Past Visitors | Helen Diller Institute

2023–2024

Visiting Faculty

Masua Sagiv

Professor Masua Sagiv is the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley and a Scholar in Residence of the Shalom Hartman Institute based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Professor Sagiv’s scholarly work focuses on the development of contemporary Judaism in Israel, as a culture, religion, nationality, and as part of Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state. Her research explores the role of law, state actors and civil society organizations in promoting social change across diverse issues: shared society, religion and gender, religion and state, and Jewish peoplehood. Prior to moving to the Bay Area, Masua was the Academic Director of the Menomadin Center for Jewish and Democratic Law at Bar-Ilan University. In addition, Masua earned her doctorate in law from Tel-Aviv University, where she wrote her dissertation on the topic of law and social change in the Halachic Feminist struggle in Israel.

Shirlee Lichtman Sadot

Dr. Shirlee Lichtman-Sadot is a Senior Lecturer in the Economics Department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Her research focuses on applied microeconomics for which she evaluates policy-relevant questions using large datasets (“big data”) and econometric methods. Her research fields include labor, education, gender and family, and health economics. Dr. Lichtman-Sadot published works and working papers deal with a wide variety of topics that mostly relate to economic, social, and health disparities. These include: California’s Paid Family Leave Program, school food environments, Jewish-Arab labor market, education and health gaps within Israel, and US welfare reform. Shirlee completed her PhD in Economics at Stanford University in 2013 and has been serving as a Research Fellow in the IZA Institute for Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany since 2019.

Larissa Remennick

Larissa Remennick immigrated from Moscow to Israel in 1991 as a young social scientist and joined the academic faculty of Bar-Ilan University in 1994. At Bar-Ilan University, she became a professor and chaired the Department of Sociology and Anthropology for several terms. She dedicated her Israeli career to the study of the multiple aspects of the mass post-Soviet Jewish emigration and the resettlement experiences of Russian-speaking Jews in Israel and in the West. More generally, her expertise is in the sociology of international migration and immigrant integration in the host countries, the formation of global ethnic diasporas, and transnationalism. Her other line of work is in the sociology of women's health, sexuality, and reproduction. Professor Remennick has published over 150 articles and chapters in major academic journals and books. She is the author of Russian Jews on Three Continents: Identity, Integration, and Conflict (Transaction, 2007, 2012) that became a common reference in the fields of Jewish/Israeli studies, post-communist studies, and migration research.

Daniel Levy

Daniel A. Levy is an Associate Professor and Academic Director of the International Program at the Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology at Reichman University – The Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. He investigates the processes and brain substrates of human memory and attention, how brain damage and neurological illness affect those cognitive abilities, and how they might be improved by physiological and behavioral interventions. He is also concerned with questions at the nexus of psychology and philosophy, such as free will, punishment, and personal identity.

Hanan Alexander

Hanan Alexander is Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of Haifa where he was Dean of the Faculty of Education and Head of the Center for Jewish and Democratic Education. An Affiliated Professor (Professor extra numerum) at the University of Warsaw, he has taught at American Jewish University, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Graduate Theological Union; Jewish Theological Seminary, and Bar Ilan University, and was Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge. A past president of the Religious Education Association and past editor of Religious Education, Alexander has published more than 140 essays and 8 books.

Eran Kaplan

Dr. Eran Kaplan is the Rhoda and Richard Goldman Professor in Israel Studies at San Francisco State University, where he teaches courses on Modern Israel, the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Israeli Cinema, Modern Hebrew Culture and on the History of Jerusalem. He has a B.A. from Tel Aviv University and a PhD in Modern Jewish History from Brandeis University. Dr. Kaplan is the author of The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and its Ideological Legacy, Beyond Post-Zionism, Projecting the Nation: History and Ideology on the Israeli Screen and with Derek Penslar The Origins of Israel, 1882-1948: A Documentary History. His current research project focuses on the evolving nature of the Israeli Left over the past century.

VISITING SCHOLARS

Anat Zanger
Anat Zanger is a professor at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television Film Studies at Tel Aviv University where she served as the head of MA studies from 2006 to 2017. She is author of several books, including Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguises (Amsterdam University Press, 2006) and Place, Memory, and Myth in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (Valentine Mitchell, London). Her project on Israeli space and cinema has been granted by the Israeli Science Foundation. She is co-editor of the book, Just Images: The Cinematic and the Ethics (Cambridge Scholar Publishing) and more recently, Jerusalem in Israeli Cinema: Wanderers, Nomads and the Walking Dead (Valentine Mitchell, London).

Leena Badran

Dr. Badran is a postdoctoral fellow at the Mental Health and Social Welfare Research Group at UC Berkeley under the supervision of Prof. Steven P Segal. Her research interests include disabilities in minority populations, with focus on mental health, intersections of vulnerable identities, rights (marriage and child custody) for people with disabilities, parenting and disability, mental health literacy, attitudes, community treatment orders (CTOs), protecting the physical health of people with severe mental illness (SMI).

She was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “Protecting the Health of People with SMI: The Role of Outpatient Commitment” at University of California Berkeley. The proposed project aims to decide on the best service approach to help people with SMI to improve their physical health and reduce their vulnerability to life-threatening conditions resulting from physical health problems. Currently, she is working on a mixed methods research based on a health model informed by the Theory of Planned Behavior combined with the Ecological Theory, focusing on transcultural psychiatry and the underutilization of mental health services among Muslims in both Israel and the US.

She is a recipient of various prestigious fellowships like The Council of Higher Education for “Outstanding Postdoctoral Arab Abroad” and Ora Gilbar award for “Outstanding PhD Proposal”. Leena holds a B.A. in Social Work from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with distinction, and M.A. & Ph.D with distinction from University of Haifa.

Nofar Yakovi Gan-Or

Dr. Nofar Yakovi Gan-Or is a postdoctoral fellow at the Aharon Barak Center for Interdisciplinary Legal Research at the Hebrew University Faculty of Law. Nofar’s scholarly work focuses on reproduction and the law and lies at the intersection of family law, constitutional law, gender, and bioethics. Her research explores the role of law in regulating reproduction and shaping familial identities and institutions from legal and social standpoints. Nofar earned her doctoral degree from Columbia University Law School, where she was an E. David Fischman Scholar. Her dissertation explores the increasingly complex legal challenges that both the Israeli and American legal systems face in the ever-changing assisted reproductive technologies landscape. Nofar also holds an LL.M. degree from Columbia Law School, an LL.B. degree from Tel-Aviv University, and an undergraduate degree in Political Science from Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Social Sciences.

2022–2023

Visiting Faculty

Jackie Feldman

Fall 2022 Israel Institute Visiting Professor
Professor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
jackiefeld@gmail.com

Jackie Feldman is a professor of anthropology at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and head of the Rabb Center for Holocaust Studies. His research interests are pilgrimage and tourism, anthropology of religion, Holocaust memory, heritagization and comparative study of museums. In addition to numerous articles, he has published two books: Above the Death-pits, beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Holocaust Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity (Berghahn, 2008), and A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land: How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli (University of Indiana, 2016). His current research project, “Memorial, museum, smartphone: Transmitting Holocaust memory in a digital generation”, examines how structures of authority, place memory, and social solidarities change as a result of widespread digital technologies and social media.

Muhammad Mudi al-Atawneh

2022–2023 Israel Institute Visiting Professor
Associate Professor, Department of Middle East Studies, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
alatawnh@bgu.ac.il

Muhammad Mudi al-Atawneh is an associate professor in the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. His research interests focus on the study of Islam in modern times, mainly in three concurrent areas: (1) Islamic law and modernity; (2) state and governance in contemporary Islamic thought and practice; and (3) Islam in Israel. He has published extensively on Islamic law and society in contemporary Arab and Islamic worlds. Muhammad founded and have served as the Head of the Middle East Studies Program at the Eilat Campus since its inception in 2007. In addition, he is the Founder-Chairman of AHD: Association of Academics for the Development of Arab Society in the Negev. Amongst its members are senior scholars, including some BGU faculty members and graduate students from diverse disciplines.

Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg

2022–2023 Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor
Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Law, Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law
hadar.rosenberg@biu.ac.il

Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg is a Professor of Law and former Associate Dean for Research at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law. She is a co-founder and co-chair of the Israeli Criminal Law Association. She specializes in criminal law and procedure, and her areas of expertise include the philosophy of criminal law, non-adversarial criminal justice, therapeutic jurisprudence, and the interface between criminal and constitutional law. Some of her recent studies focus on criminal justice reform and on criminal justice in the digital age. Before joining Bar-Ilan Prof. Dancig-Rosenberg served as the Academic Director of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Legal Clinic for Violence Against Women. She serves as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Israeli Minister of Justice on Criminal Procedure and Evidence Law and as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Israeli Minister of Justice on Formulating Measures to Protect the Public Against Cyberbullying.

Hanan Alexander

2022–2023 Koret Visiting Professor in Israel Studies
Professor of Philosophy of Education, University of Haifa
hanana@edu.haifa.ac.il

Hanan Alexander is Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of Haifa where he was Dean of the Faculty of Education and Head of the Center for Jewish and Democratic Education. An Affiliated Professor (Professor Extra Numerum) at the University of Warsaw, he has taught at American Jewish University, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Graduate Theological Union; Jewish Theological Seminary, and Bar Ilan University, and was Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge. A past president of the Religious Education Association and past editor of Religious Education, Alexander has published more than 140 essays and 8 books.

Daniel Levy

2022–2023 Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor
Associate Professor, Former Dean, Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, Reichman University
daniel.levy@idc.ac.il

Masua Sagiv

2022–2023 Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies
Scholar-in-Residence, Shalom Hartman Institute
masua.sagiv@biu.ac.il

Dr. Masua Sagiv is the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley and a Scholar in Residence of the Shalom Hartman Institute based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Masua’s scholarly work focuses on the development of contemporary Judaism in Israel, as a culture, religion, nationality, and as part of Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state. Her research explores the role of law, state actors and civil society organizations in promoting social change across diverse issues: shared society, religion and gender, religion and state, and Jewish peoplehood. Prior to moving to the Bay Area, Masua was the Academic Director of the Menomadin Center for Jewish and Democratic Law at Bar-Ilan University. In addition, Masua earned her doctorate in law from Tel-Aviv University, where she wrote her dissertation on the topic of law and social change in the Halachic Feminist struggle in Israel.

Roy Shapira

2022–2023 Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor
Associate Professor, Radzyner Law School, Reichman University
roy.shapira@idc.ac.il

Roy Shapira is an Associate Professor at Reichman University’s (IDC) Law School. Prior to returning to Israel and joining Reichman, Shapira received his SJD and LLM degrees from Harvard Law School, taught at Harvard Economics Department for six years, served as a reputation consultant, and headed the research at the Stigler Center (University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business). Shapira’s research focuses on reputation, corporate governance, and economic regulation. His current projects explore the challenges of holding big business accountable, the role of the media in assuring effective regulation and markets, and the tendency of Israeli courts to rely on Delaware corporate law as inspiration.

Michal Tamir

Associate Professor, The Academic Center of Law and Science, Israel and Adjunct Professor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University
tammichal@gmail.com

Prof. Michal Tamir is an Associate Professor in The Academic Center of Law and Science, Israel and an Adjunct Professor in the Hebrew university of Jerusalem and in Bar-Ilan University. In the 2021-2022 Academic year she was an Israel Institute Visiting Professor of Israel Studies at UC Berkeley. Between the years of 2017-2019 she served as the president of the Israeli Law and Society Association; 2012-2013 Tikvah Fellow-in-Residence, NYU School of Law; 2006-2007 Global Research Fellow, Hauser Program, NYU School of Law; LL.D by Hebrew University of Jerusalem; LL.M., Hebrew University of Jerusalem; LL.B. University of Haifa. Her research, which focuses mainly in the area of law and society, is characterized by a holistic approach to public law and to its relations with public policy.

Visiting Scholars

Uri Mor

Senior Lecturer, the Department of Hebrew Language at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
uriozmor@gmail.com

Uri Mor is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Hebrew Language at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. In his research he focuses on Classical Hebrew and Aramaic, and Modern Hebrew and its emergence. His work integrates linguistic, philological, and sociolinguistic methods in order to delineate different speech communities, contact situations, and corpora of Hebrew and Aramaic, and to explore the ties between language, nationality, normativity, geography, and culture. His publications include Judean Hebrew: The Language of the Hebrew Documents from Judea between the First and the Second Revolts and he is currently working on a grammatical and sociolinguistic analysis of the Tannaitic Midrash Sifre Zuta on Numbers.

Achinoam Aldouby

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Theater Arts at Tel Aviv University
achinoam73@gmail.com

Achinoam is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Theater Arts at Tel Aviv University. Her research interests involve Jewish and Israeli theater and the adaptation of canonic texts and historical events to the stage. Aldouby’s doctoral project examines theatrical representations of Shoah remembrance in early 21st century Israel (Advisors: Dr. Yair Lipshitz, Prof. Iris Milner). In her research she explores the performative modes of negotiating history, trauma, and Jewish identity and the implications of the current generational shift on the Shoah’s memory. She holds a M.A. in Theater Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem were she wrote her thesis on Theater performances of Rabbinic Literature. Currently, she serves as the Associate Editor of Bamah, an Israeli Performing Arts Magazine, and as the Secretary-General for the Israeli Association for Theater Research.

Noa Kwartaz Avraham

Ph.D. Candidate, Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies, Tel Aviv University
nkwartaz@gmail.com

Noa Kwartaz-Avraham is a Ph.D. candidate at the Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies, Tel Aviv University. In her dissertation, Noa examines the question of how, and to what extent, the members of the Israeli parliament (the Knesset), were able to impact the content of government legislation, during a major shift in the state’s character: from a welfare administrative state, providing welfare services to its citizens directly, towards a regulatory state, privatizing the production of such services, and mostly supervising their provision. Noa holds an LL.B., LL.M and a B.A. (in Government Studies) from Reichman University (formerly IDC Herzliya), all three with distinction. Her LL.M dissertation examined the characteristics and conflicts in Israeli urban planning laws, regarding the preservation of historic buildings. Noa’s research interest are parliamentary studies, the history of parliament, the legislation process, separation of powers theory and collective memory.

Moria Paz

Fellow in International Law, Stanford Law School
mpaz@law.stanford.edu

Moria Paz critically investigates the place of minorities, migrants, and refugees within legal orders (international and national) that are fundamentally rooted in state sovereignty. Her scholarship undertakes an inquiry into the actual, on-the-ground operation of human rights law and international law (and their intersection with national law), aiming to develop a functional understanding of the limits and possibilities of using extraterritorial law to protect the interests of individuals and minority groups. She is currently working on a new book, tentatively titled Network or State? The Alliance Israélite Universelle, International Law, and the History of Jewish Self-Determination. Paz has previously published two books: The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century which was nominated for the 2020 National Jewish Book Award and 2019 Just Security Holiday Reading List, and The Failed Promise of Language Rights which addresses different national and international models for the protection of minority language rights.She is the recipient of the Laylin Prize for Best Paper in International Law. Paz is a Visiting fellow at Stanford Law School. She previously served as a Fellow at the Center on National Security and the Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, as a Law and International Security Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and as a Visiting Researcher at TRAFFLAB: Labor Perspectives to Human Trafficking in Tel Aviv University.

2021–2022

Visiting Faculty

Hanan Alexander

Koret Visiting Professor in Israel Studies
Professor of Philosophy of Education, University of Haifa
hanana@berkeley.edu
hanana@edu.haifa.ac.il

Hanan Alexander is Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of Haifa where he was Dean of the Faculty of Education and Head of the Center for Jewish Education. He has taught at American Jewish University, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Graduate Theological Union; Jewish Theological Seminary, and Bar IlaUniversity, and was Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge. A past editor of Religious Education, Alexander has published more than 130 essays and 7 boks.

Keren Friedman-Peleg
Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor
Senior Lecturer and Dean of Students, College of Management, Academic Studies
kerenfriedman@berkeley.edu

Keren Friedman-Peleg is a Senior Lecturer and Dean of Students at the College of Management- Academic Studies, and from October, will serve as Dean of the School of Behavioral Sciences and the Department of Psychology. A medical and psychological anthropologist, her research combines clinical questions of security-related trauma diagnosis, treatment, and prevention with socio-political questions of national belonging and inequality.

Masua Sagiv
Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies
Scholar in Residence, Shalom Hartman Institute
masua.sagiv@biu.ac.il
masua.sagiv@berkeley.edu

Masua Sagiv is the 2021–2022 Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute. She was most recently the Academic Director of the Menomadin Center for Jewish and Democratic Law, at Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law. She is also an adjunct lecturer at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law. Masua received her PhD from Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law and an LL.M (with honors) from Columbia University School of Law. In 2020 she was awarded the Ben Halpern Award for Best Dissertation in Israel Studies. Her research examines private religious/religion oriented legal institutions as a strategy for feminist social change in Israel, and the state’s reaction towards them.

Michal Tamir
Israel Institute Visiting Professor of Israel Studies
Associate Professor, The Academic Center of Law and Science, Israel and Adjunct Professor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University
tammichal@gmail.com
michal.tamir@berkeley.edu

Michal Tamir is an Associate Professor in The Academic Center of Law and Science, Israel and an Adjunct Professor in the Hebrew university of Jerusalem and in Bar-Ilan University. Between the years of 2017-2019 she served as the president of the Israeli Law and Society Association; 2012-2013 Tikvah Fellow-in-Residence, NYU School of Law; 2006-2007 Global Research Fellow, Hauser Program, NYU School of Law; LL.D by Hebrew University of Jerusalem; LL.M., Hebrew University of Jerusalem; LL.B. University of Haifa. Her research, which focuses mainly in the area of law and society, is characterized by a holistic approach to public law and to its relations with public policy.

Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg
Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor
Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research, Bar-Ilan University
hadar.rosenberg@berkeley.edu
hadar.rosenberg@biu.ac.il

Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg is a Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law. She is a co-founder and co-chair of the Israeli Criminal Law Association. She specializes in criminal law and procedure, and her areas of expertise include the philosophy of criminal law, non-adversarial criminal justice, therapeutic jurisprudence, and the interface between criminal and constitutional law. Before joining Bar-Ilan Prof. Dancig-Rosenberg served as the Academic Director of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Legal Clinic for Violence Against Women. She serves as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Israeli Minister of Justice on Criminal Procedure and Evidence Law and as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Israeli Minister of Justice on Formulating Measures to Protect the Public Against Cyberbullying.

Uri Mor
Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor
Department of Hebrew Language, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
urimor@berkeley.edu
uriozmor@hotmail.com

Paula Kabalo
Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor
Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
pkabalo@bgu.ac.il

Paula Kabalo is the former director of the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. In 2011–2017, she was the founding chair of the Woodman-Scheller Israel Studies International MA program. Since 2017, she has also been the founding head of the Azrieli Center for Israel Studies at the Institute, a complex of research hubs that aim to decode core themes related to the Israel phenomenon and the Zionist Idea. Her research focuses on the history of citizen associations and civil society in Israel and David Ben-Gurion’s relations with various strata of society in Israel and the Jewish world.

Yael (Yali) Nativ
Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor
Senior Lecturer, Academic College for Society and Arts, Levinsky College of Education
yalinativ@gmail.com

Dr. Yael Nativ is a Senior Lecturer at the Academic College for Society and Arts and the Levinsky College of Education, both in Israel. She has also been teaching for the Mason Gross School of the Arts Online at Rutgers State University of New Jersey. Professor Yael Nativ received her PhD in the Sociology of Education from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her Master of Arts in Creative Arts/Creative Arts Education from San Francisco State University. Her fields of interest are the social history of dance in Israel, dance and Zionism, gender and dance, girls’ studies and the body, the aging body among professional dancers, representations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Israeli dance, among other topics.

Amnon Reichman
Fall 2021 Robbins Collection Visiting Professor of Comparative Law
Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Haifa and co-Principal Investigator (PI), Minerva Center for the Rule of Law Under Extreme Conditions, University of Haifa
reichman@law.haifa.ac.il
reichman@law.berkeley.edu

Amnon Reichman is a Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Haifa and a co-Principal Investigator (PI) of the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law Under Extreme Conditions at the University of Haifa. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF). Professor Reichman will be returning to Berkeley during the Spring 2021 semester.

Visiting Scholars

Naama Sadan
PhD Candidate, The Advanced School of Environmental Studies Hebrew University of Jerusalem
naama.sadan@berkeley.edu

Naama Sadan is a doctoral candidate at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests include institutional theory, environmental ethics, comparative education, change theory, and archetypal and behavioral studies. Sadan’s thesis examines the different and sometimes opposite motivations of discourses around environmental and sustainability education. She researches the motives and support systems that lead teachers to initiate environmental education programs in Palestinian, secular Jewish, and Hasidic schools in Jerusalem. Her dissertation expands this model to look at the case of San Mateo County in Silicon Valley, CA and examine the semantic and social ties that create conditions for educators to promote environmental and sustainability initiatives in the area. She holds a BA from Hebrew University and a permaculture design certification from Beit Ya’ar. She has also taught urban planning and environmental studies at the Hebrew University High School and Talmud and Hassidut at Hebrew University’s Havruta Beit Midrash.

Mishael Zion
Director of the Mandel Program for Leadership in Jewish Culture
mishzion@gmail.com

Rabbi Mishael Zion is an educator for The Bronfman Fellowship, and a former Co-Director. He is Director of the Mandel Program for Leadership in Jewish Culture. Mishael grew up in Jerusalem, served in the Israel Defense Forces, studied at Yeshivat Maale Gilboa, and graduated summa cum laude from Hebrew University. He is the author of Esther: A New Israeli Commentary and, together with his father, Noam Zion, the author of Halaila Hazeh: An Israeli Haggadah and A Night to Remember: The Haggadah of Contemporary Voices. Mishael holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology and Jewish thought from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and rabbinic ordination from Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School in New York. He has served as a faculty member at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning in New York, and has been a visiting scholar at the New York University School of Law.

Ortal Merhav
Gordon College of Education, Faculty of Education
ortalmerhav@gmail.com

Dr. Ortal Merhav holds a PhD from the School of Education at Tel Aviv University. Her dissertation examined the renewal of the Jewish community in the non-religious space in Israel. In 2018, she presented one chapter of her doctoral thesis at a conference at the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel studies. Ortal also received her Master’s degree with honors (Summa Cum Laude) from Tel Aviv University. She is a lecturer at the Gordon College of Education, whose teaching focuses on various topics, such as community building, qualitative research, and innovation in technology. She has held prior positions as a teaching assistant at Tel-Aviv University in the Department of Management and Leadership in Education. Ortal has co-authored two articles dealing with identity in school vision statements, which appeared in the scholarly journals Studies in Educational Administration and Organization (in Hebrew), and Leadership and Policy in Schools.

Ram Rivlin
Hebrew University, Faculty of Law
ram.rivlin@mail.huji.ac.il

Dr. Ram Rivlin has been a Lecturer at Hebrew University, Faculty of Law since 2013. He has held prior positions in Tel-Aviv University as a Postdoctoral Fellow and New York University School of Law as Postdoctoral Tikvah Scholar in Residence. In 2017, Dr. Rivlin published his scholarly work, “The Puzzle of Intra-Familial Commodification” for the University of Toronto Law Journal.

Scholars in Residence in Jewish Law

R. Yonatan Cohen

R. Cohen serves as a Rabbinic Mentor for Yeshivat Chovevei Torah rabbinical students and is a Mentor to Kevah Teaching Fellows. He serves on the founding board of Kevah, and is a founding advisory board member of the Merkavah Torah Institute. R. Cohen holds a BA in Philosophy from McGill University in Montreal, and received rabbinic ordination for Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. Additionally, he is a Sr. Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

R. Joshua Ladon

Rabbi Joshua Ladon is the Director of Education for the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, where he guides the content and curriculum of national and regional programs to help to ensure our cutting-edge offerings speak to the realities of the Jewish community and the challenges of the Jewish people. Prior to Hartman, he served as the Dean of Student and Jewish Life at the Jewish Community High School of the Bay. Joshua received a BA from Washington University in St. Louis and subsequently lived in Jerusalem for seven years, completing an MA in Jewish Thought at Tel Aviv University.

Ariel Evan Mayse

Ariel Evan Mayse joined the faculty of Stanford University in 2017 as an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies, after previously serving as the Director of Jewish Studies and Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts, and a research fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Michigan. He holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from Harvard University and rabbinic ordination from Beit Midrash Har’el in Israel.

2020–2021

Visiting Faculty

Ehud Eiran
Israel Institute Visiting Professor of Israel Studies
Associate Professor, University of Haifa
eiran59@berkeley.edu

Dr. Ehud Eiran is a Professor of International Relations at Haifa University. His research focuses on conflict and conflict resolution, governance, and policy in Israel and the Middle East. He is currently a visiting scholar in Political Science at Stanford University and an Israel Institute Visiting Faculty at UC Berkeley affiliated with the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies.

Roy Peled
Israel Institute Visiting Professor of Israel Studies (FY20)
Koret Visiting Professor in Israel Studies, UC Berkeley (FY21)
Haim Striks School of Law, College of Management – Academic Studies in Israel
roypeled@gmail.com

Dr. Roy Peled is an Administrative and Constitutional Law professor at the Haim Striks School of Law, College of Management – Academic Studies in Israel. Roy Peled was the 2019-2020 Israel Institute Visiting Professor. He is the Koret Visiting Professor in Israel Studies at UC Berkeley for 2020–2021.

Tomer Persico
Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies
Academic Director at Kolot
Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute
Tel Aviv University
tomerpersico@gmail.com

Dr. Tomer Persico is a Shalom Hartman Institute Research Fellow, and a professor at Tel-Aviv University. His fields of study are contemporary spirituality, Jewish Renewal, forms of secularization and trends of secularization and religiosity in Israel. 2019-2020 is his third year as the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies.

Stephanie Shosh Rotem
Berkeley Institute Visiting Professor of Israel Studies
Tel Aviv University
srotem@netvision.net.il

Dr. Stephanie (Shosh) Rotem is a Teaching Fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Interdisciplinary Program in the Arts. She served as Head of the Diploma Program in Curatorship and Museum Studies and as Coordinator of the Research Committee at the Faculty of the Arts. In Spring 2021 she is serving a second term as Visiting Professor of Israel Studies at UC Berkeley.

Eran Kaplan
Berkeley Institute Visiting Professor of Israel Studies
Rhoda and Richard Goldman Chair in Israel Studies, San Francisco State University
erank@sfsu.edu

Dr. Eran Kaplan is the Rhoda and Richard Goldman Chair in Israel Studies at San Francisco State University where he teaches courses on Modern Israel, the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Israeli Cinema, Modern Hebrew Culture and on the History of Jerusalem. He has a B.A. from Tel Aviv University and a PhD in Modern Jewish History from Brandeis University.

Visiting Scholars

Yoel Greenberg
Lecturer and Head of the Musicology Program, Bar-Ilan University
Violist, Carmel Quartet

Dr. Greenberg’s research studies the evolution of sonata form as a self-organizing system; interactions of music, arts and literature in the early 20th century; and computerized recognition of musical style. He has a BA in Math and Computer Science and an MA and PhD in music all from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Eva Gurevich
PhD Candidate of Near Eastern Studies and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University
Graduate Fellow, Schusterman Center for Israel Studies

Eva Gurevich researches the intersection of cultural history and political theology, examining Israeli literary and public figures who converted from ‘left’ to ‘right’ wing after the 1967 war, and the history of the Israeli settler movement. She holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.

2019–2020

Visiting Faculty

Tomer Persico
Tel Aviv University

Dr. Tomer Persico has taught for the last eight years at the Department for Comparative Religion in Tel-Aviv University, and has joined the Shalom Hartman Institute as a Research Fellow four years ago. His fields of study are contemporary spirituality, Jewish Renewal, Forms of secularization and trends of secularization and religiosity in Israel. His book, The Jewish Meditative Tradition, was published by Tel Aviv University Press in 2016. He is an activist for freedom of religion, writes the most popular blog in Hebrew on religion, has written hundreds articles on these subjects for the popular media. This year he has begun working as the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies, Dept. of Near Eastern Studies, Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, Center for Jewish Studies at U.C. Berkeley, and a Shalom Hartman Institute Scholar in Residence.

Ammon Reichman
University of Haifa

Amnon Reichman is a an Associate Professor of law (tenured 2006) at the faculty of law, University of Haifa and a co-Principal Investigator (PI) of the recently-established Minerva Center for the Rule of Law Under Extreme Conditions at the University of Haifa. Professor Reichman specializes in public law (constitutional law and administrative law), and his areas of expertise include models of regulation, neo-institutionalism, separation of powers, theories of judicial review, human rights, and comparative constitutional and administrative law. He is the founder and chair of the Research Forum on the Rule of Law (faculty of law), and heads the graduate program (LL.M.) that specializes in civil and administrative law. He taught and developed the syllabus for the legal segment of the graduate program in Emergency and Disaster Management (Geography Department). Professor Reichman is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF). He conducted his post-graduate studies at the Center for Ethics and the Professions at Harvard University (2001).

Stephanie Shosh Rotem
Tel Aviv University

Roy Peled
Haim Striks School of Law, College of Management, Academic Studies in Israel

Visiting Scholars

Eva Gurevich
Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University
egurevich@brandeis.edu

Eva is a doctoral candidate at the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department at Brandeis University, and a Graduate Fellow at the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. Working at the intersection of cultural history and political theology, her dissertation is examining a group of hegemonic Israeli literary and public figures who converted from ‘left’ to ‘right’ wing in the aftermath of the 1967 war, paving the way for the settlement movement as we know it today. Her research interests include Jewish political thought, religious and secular messianism, gender and nationalism, radicalism and fundamentalism, place studies, as well as Israeli and Palestinian visual arts and literature. She holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and before starting Brandeis, she had worked at the Magnes Collection at UC Berkeley.

Yoel Greenberg
Department of Music, Bar Ilan University
yoel.greenberg@biu.ac.il

Dr. Yoel Greenberg is a lecturer and head of the musicology program at the department of music at Bar-Ilan University, and a violist with the Carmel Quartet.His research concerns the evolution of sonata form as a self-organizing system, interactions of music, arts and literature in the early 20th century, and computerized recognition of musical style. He completed his first degree with honors in Mathematics and Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and continued to an MA and PhD in the music department at the Hebrew University. He Joined the Faculty at Bar-Ilan in 2012. Greenberg’s published articles include Fugue as chaos in the early 20th century (Music and Letters 2018), Schoenberg and anti-Semitic imagery (IRASM 2017), computerized differentiation between the styles of Mozart and Haydn, the music of Erwin Schulhoff (Music and Letters 2014), formal procedures in Haydn symphonies (Journal of Musicology 2012) and the chamber music of Paul Ben-Haim. Yoel Greenberg is a 2019-2020 visiting scholar with the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies.

2018-2019

Visiting Faculty

Tomer Persico
Tel Aviv University

Itai Ater
Tel Aviv University

Itai Ater is an economics professor at Tel Aviv University, a research fellow at the CEPR, and the head of the Strategy and innovation track at the Coller School of Management. In his research, Itai investigates the impact of government policies and regulations on markets, firms and consumers. For instance, in one project, Itai examines how mandatory price transparency in the Israeli Supermarket industry affected prices and cost of living. Itai finds that Israeli households saved about $27 from this reform. In other projects, Itai examines how changes in law enforcement (for instance, extending the right to counsel to arrestees) affected police activity and crime rates in Israel.

Ammon Reichman
University of Haifa

Itay Fishhendler
Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Professor Itay Fischhendler heads the Environmental and Planning Program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests focus on environmental conflict resolution, natural resources governance, and decision-making under conditions of political and environmental uncertainties. He is a leading scholar on transboundary water institutions and Middle Eastern water policy.

2017–2018

Visiting Faculty

Rami Zeedan
Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies, University of Kansas
rami.zeedan@openu.ac.il

Dr. Rami Zeedan is a political scientist and historian, teaching at the Open University of Israel, as well as the Tel-Aviv campus of New York University and Kinneret College. In 2014-2016 Dr. Zeedan held a two-year fellowship for outstanding post-doctoral researchers from the Council for Higher Education in Israel, while holding a Taub-Schusterman fellowship with the New York University (USA) followed by a Fritz Thyssen fellowship with the Zentrum Moderner Orient (GERMANY). His research interests include Israeli politics, Middle-Eastern politics, history of modern Israel, ethnic politics, urban affairs and local governments, and public opinion. Dr. Zeedan is the author of two books focusing on Israeli Arabs. His first book: Battalion of Arab – The History of the Minorities Unit in the IDF from 1948 to 1956 (Modan, 2015. in Hebrew), revealed the Israeli policies of recruitment to the IDF implemented towards the Arabs. His next book: The Arab-Palestinians in Israeli Political System in the 21st Century (Lexington Books, forthcoming), examines the trends of integration vs segregation of Arabs in the Israeli political system.

Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg
Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor\
Associate Dean for Research and Law Professor at Bar-Ilan University
hadar.rosenberg@biu.ac.il

Dr. Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg is an Assistant Professor at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law. Her fields of interest are criminal law and procedure, non-adversarial criminal justice and the interface between criminal and constitutional law. Some of her recent publications in English include Unconstitutional Criminalization, New Criminal Law Review (forthcoming, 2016), Criminal Law Multitasking, Restorative Criminal Justice, and Pain, Love and Voice: The Place of Domestic Violence Victims in Sentencing.

Michael Shalev
Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
michael.shalev@gmail.com

Michael Shalev is Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University, and past chair of two departments, Sociology & Anthropology and Political Science. He is currently an Israel Institute Visiting Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Shalev’s graduate degrees are from the London School of Economics and the University of Wisonsin at Madison. His research interests include political economy, stratification and inequality, electoral and protest politics, and the welfare state. He is the author and co-editor, respectively, of two books on the political economy of Israel published by Oxford University Press: Labour and the Political Economy in Israel(1992) and Neoliberalism as a State Project: Changing the Political Economy of Israel(forthcoming).

Amnon Reichman
Robbins Collection Visiting Professor of Comparative Law Professor
Faculty of Law, University of Haifa and co-Principal Investigator (PI)
Minerva Center for the Rule of Law Under Extreme Conditions, University of Haifa
reichman@law.haifa.ac.il

Keren Friedman-Peleg
Senior Lecturer and Dean of Students, College of Management- Academic Studies

Keren Friedman-Peleg is a senior lecturer at the School of Behavioral Sciences, and the Head of the President’s Program for Excellence at the College of Management–Academic Studies, Israel. She received her Ph.D. in 2009 in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology from Tel Aviv University, under the supervision of Prof. Yoram Bilu and Prof. Moshe Shokeid. In 2008, Friedman-Peleg was a post-doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and in the Medical School at Tel Aviv University during 2010-2011. Based on her ethnographic research at non-profit organizations in Israel–NATAL (The Israeli Center for Victims of Terror and War) and ITC (Israel Trauma Coalition)– she has published articles on the intersection between therapeutic discourse and national belonging in leading journals, such as Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry and Transcultural Psychiatry (with Y. Bilu). The full manuscript of her doctoral thesis – entitled “A Nation on the Couch: The Politics of Trauma in Israel” was published in the early spring of 2014 at Magnes–The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Press, and is currently under advanced process of review at the University of Toronto Press.

David Kasher
UC Berkeley School of Law
Senior Rabbinic Educator at Kevah Lecturer
dkasher@kevah.org

Rabbi David Kasher is a Senior Rabbinic Educator at Kevah. David grew up bouncing back and forth between the Bay Area and Brooklyn, hippies and hassidim, and has been trying to synthesize these two worlds ever since. After graduating from Wesleyan University, he studied for several years in yeshivot in Israel before heading to rabbinical school at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, where he was ordained in 2007. He returned to Northern California, and until 2012 was the Senior Jewish Educator at Berkeley Hillel. While there, David joined the faculty at Berkeley Law as a lecturer, and began a doctoral degree there – studying religious and secular jurisprudence – which he completed in the Summer of 2016. Amidst all of this, David taught classes around the Bay Area, and served as an advisor to the nascent Kevah. He is a teacher of nearly all forms of classical Jewish literature, but his greatest passion is Torah commentary, and he produces the weekly ParshaNut blog and podcast exploring the weird and wonderful riches of the genre.

Visiting Scholars

Ruth Zafran
Radzyner Law School, IDC, Herzliya
rzafran@idc.ac.il

Ruth Zafran is an Associate Professor at IDC, Herzliya, Radzyner Law School. Her research focuses on family law, especially the status of children in the family and the legal ramifications of Assisted Reproductive Technology. Some of her recent chapters in refereed books and articles in refereed journals include: ‘Children Are a Blessing’-Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Parenthood by Same-Sex Couplesand The Equal Right To Be A Parent? – Resort to Surrogacy in Israel.

Smadar Ben-Natan
Tel Aviv University
smadarl@post.tau.ac.il

Smadar Ben-Natan is a PhD candidate at the Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law. Her research interests include human rights, international and transnational law, criminal justice (fair trial rights, juvenile justice), military courts and tribunals, torture, feminism, immigration and asylum, the legal profession and role of lawyers. Her current research is titled Models of Criminal Enemy Adjudication: Armed Conflict, Martial Law and Criminal Law.

2016–2017

Visiting Faculty

Tamar Kricheli-Katz
Associate Professor, Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law

Tamar Kricheli-Katz holds a joint appointment in the faculty of law and the department of sociology. She received her PhD and JSM from Stanford University and her LL.B from the Hebrew University. She has also served as a law clerk and a legal advisor to Justice T. Or of the Israeli Supreme Court. Her research interests include strati cation, sociology of law, social psychology and gender, focusing on the relationships among choice, responsibility, moral judgment and discrimination.

Nissim Mizrachi
Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University, Gershon H. Gordon Faculty of Social Sciences

Prof. Nissim Mizrachi is the chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University. He received his MA, summa cum laude, from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University; he earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as a Fulbright Scholar. His main areas of interest are the sociology of knowledge and culture, science and medicine, ethnic studies, social inequality and human rights.

Tali Regev
Brandeis University Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya (IDC)

Dr. Regev is a researcher and lecturer at the School of Economics at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya (IDC). Dr. Regev completed her doctorate in economics at the MIT. Her research interests include the labor market and macro-economics, focusing on unemployment, income inequality, and discrimination. Dr. Regev is also active in community affairs, and was a member of the advisory forum to the Minister of Finance; the Trachtenberg Committee; the Committee of the Council for Higher Education for making higher education more accessible to disadvantaged populations; and more.

Michael Shalev
Hebrew University

Michael Shalev is Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University, and past chair of two departments, Sociology & Anthropology and Political Science. He is currently an Israel Institute Visiting Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Shalev’s graduate degrees are from the London School of Economics and the University of Wisonsin at Madison. His research interests include political economy, stratification and inequality, electoral and protest politics, and the welfare state. He is the author and co-editor, respectively, of two books on the political economy of Israel published by Oxford University Press: Labour and the Political Economy in Israel (1992) and Neoliberalism as a State Project: Changing the Political Economy of Israel (forthcoming).

Ilana Szobel
Brandeis University

Ilana Szobel is Assistant Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature. She received her doctorate from the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Her scholarly interests include a range of issues regarding identity with a sensitivity to inclusion and exclusion. In her teaching, she underlines challenges posed by feminism, war and peace, the Holocaust, family structure, economic and cultural dislocation as entry points for students to engage Israeli society and culture, drawing upon psychoanalytic and feminist theories of trauma, witness theory, memory studies, and lm theories.

Visiting Scholars

Smadar Ben-Natan
Tel Aviv University
smadarl@post.tau.ac.il

Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg
Bar-Ilan University
hadar.rosenberg@biu.ac.il

Tamara Lotner Lev
Tel Aviv University

Tamara Lotner Lev is a PhD. Candidate and a fellow at the Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies, Tel Aviv University. Tamara Holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Law and Latin American Studies (The Hebrew University), and M.A in Public Policy (Tel Aviv University). Her academic fields of interest are law, environment and energy, and the wider arenas of policy and regulation relating to them. Her current research concerns comparative, economic and non-economic analysis of environmental regulation on offshore oil and gas industry. Tamara served as a course director of the Environmental Policy Clinic at the Porter School for Environmental Studies at Tel Aviv University; as a lecturer in the College for Law and Business in Ramat Gan, and as a researcher in the Law and Environment Program in Tel Aviv University. Previously, Tamara worked as a legal journalist, as practicing lawyer and as environmental projects entrepreneur.

Zeynep Civcik
Brandeis University
zeynepcivcik@gmail.com

Zeynep Civcik received her PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from Brandeis University, where her research concentrates on the role of the military in politics in Israel and in Turkey. She holds an MA and a BA in International Relations from the Middle East Technical University. She is currently researching civil-military relations in Israel and Turkey, and studying a comparison of military interventions.

Yael Plitmann

Yael Plitmann holds an LL.B. from Tel Aviv University and an LL.M. from Yale Law School. As a young Israeli scholar in the fields of law, religion, and sociology, Plitmann focuses her research on perceptions of minority communities within Israeli law and the narrative tensions and engagements of minority communities with official law and legal principles. Her work is multidisciplinary and comparative. It explores the intersections and entanglements between Israeli law and Jewish law, including the way their entanglement in Israel’s legal framework impacts religious minority communities. Her work fits very much within both programs of the Berkeley Institute – its Program on Israel Studies and its Program on Jewish Law, Thought, and Identity – and integrates them nicely.

Patricia Munro

Dr. Patricia Munro holds a doctorate in Sociology from UC Berkeley. Her work examines the role of the synagogue in mediating changes in American Jewish practice and belief. Her dissertation, “What if I Drop the Torah?”: Tensions and Resolutions in Accomplishing B’nai Mitzvah Rituals, provides an example of how the synagogue, as an explicitly Jewish space where Jewish practice and belief are reproduced and interpreted, is also the place where congregational leaders and lay members negotiate issues of Jewish policy. Munro’s research is centered in the culturally diverse and Jewishly diffuse Bay Area. From this base, her current research includes examining Bay Area Jewish pluralism from several perspectives and developing a longitudinal study that investigates the role of synagogue affiliation in shaping Jewish knowledge, practice, and identity.

Motti Regev
The Open University of Israel
mottire@openu.ac.il

Motti Regev is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at the Open University of Israel. He currently heads the MA program in Cultural Studies. He is a sociologist of art and culture, and researches popular music studies. His recent research focuses on pop-rock music and cultural globalization. Some of his latest books include Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity, Popular Music and Culture in Israel, and Sociology of Culture: A General Introduction.

2015–2016

Visiting Faculty

Hila Shamir
Israel Institute Visiting Professor of Law
Tel Aviv University

Dr. Hila Shamir is one of our Israel Institute visiting professors, and an Associate Professor at the Buchman Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University. She has also served as a Visiting Professor at Cornell Law School and as Lecturer for the Harvard University Department of Government. She also served as a law clerk to Israeli Supreme Court Justice, Eliyahu Mazza. Dr. Shamir received her LL.B from the Tel Aviv School of Law, and her LL.M and S.J.D. degrees from Harvard. She has studied the division of law between the family, the market, and the state and the distributive effects of various institutional arrangements on gender and class inequality. Dr. Shamir will be researching for a book project about the ‘Law of Care,’ which will be a comparative study between Israel, the United States, and Australia. She will be exploring the regulation of (traditionally) women’s paid and unpaid care work. She hopes to reveal the similarities and variations that exist between the three states and the potential for market-based provision of welfare in the age of globalization.

Ori Aronson
Israel Institute Visiting Professor
The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Visiting Professor of Israeli Law and Society
Bar-Ilan University

Dr. Ori Aronson is visiting from Bar-Ilan University, where he is a assistant professor at the Faculty of Law. He is also a founding member of the Center for Jewish and Democratic Law. Ori received an LL.B from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and LL.M and S.J.D degrees from Harvard Law School. He has also served as a law clerk to Israeli Supreme Court Chief Justice, Aharon Barak, as well as to Judge Jon O. Newman (United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit). His research interests include constitutional law and civil procedure, with a special interest in political and constitutional implications of the institutional design of court systems. While in Berkeley, he will continue his research in the complex set of questions that arise out of the design of democratic institutions.

Yuval Ben Bassat
Visiting Professor of History
Lecturer, University of Haifa

Dr. Yuval Ben-Bassat is a senior lecturer at the Department of Middle Eastern History at the University of Haifa where he teaches Ottoman and Turkish history. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago (2007). His research focuses on petitions sent from Palestine to the Ottoman capital at the end of the 19th century, the rural population of Palestine at that time, the early Jewish-Arab conflict, the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, and WWI in the Levant. Dr. Ben-Bassat is the author of Petitioning the Sultan: Protests and Justice in Late Ottoman Palestine (London: I.B.TAURIS, 2013, 346pp), and the co-editor of Rethinking Late Ottoman Palestine: The Young Turk Rule, 1908-1918 (London: I.B. TAURIS, 2011, 310pp.).

Visiting Scholars

Guy Davidov

Prof. Guy Davidov, LL.B (Tel-Aviv, 1996), LL.M. (Toronto, 1998), SJD (Toronto, 2002), is the Elias Lieberman Chair in Labour Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he previously served as Vice-Dean as well as Chair of Graduate Studies at the Faculty of Law. He is the founding Chair of the Labour Law Research Network, a new world-wide organization of labour law scholars; Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations; and a member of the advisory board of several other labour law journals and research centres. He has published widely on labour law issues in top journals, including the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Modern Law Review, the University of Toronto Law Journal, Law & Social Inquiry, Industrial Law Journal and the Comparative Labour Law and Policy Journal, and has co-edited (with Brian Langille) two influential books, Boundaries and Frontiers of Labour Law (Hart, 2006) and The Idea of Labour Law (OUP, 2011).

Shlomit Azgad-Tromer

Shlomit Azgad-Tromer holds a Ph.D., an LL.B. and a B.A. in English, all awarded magna cum laude from Tel Aviv University. During her doctoral studies, Shlomit was a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School. Her research interests revolve around issues of corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, corporate bankruptcy, and corporate accountability towards retail consumers. Recent articles include “A Hierarchy of Markets: How Basic Needs Induce Market Failure”, an economic analysis of the hierarchy of bounded voluntariness in various product markets, and “Corporations and the 99%: Team Production Revisited”, raising the timely concern for the agency costs embedded in the relationship between the general public and institutional investors. Shlomit frequently publishes op-eds on corporate law and economics in Israeli dailies, and has extensive practice experience, including some of Israel’s largest corporate and securities transactions. At Berkeley, Shlomit’s research addresses systemically-important non-financial corporations.

Tamara Lotner Lev

Shira Offer

Shira Offer is an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago and was a Research Analyst at the Alfred P. Sloan Center on Parents, Children, and Work. Her main research interests include personal networks, work and family, gender relations, and poverty. As a sociologist studying families, Offer’s research is motivated by the concern of how the current social, cultural, and economic climate affects the well-being and functioning of parents and children of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. She has published a number of articles in such journals as the American Sociological Review, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Forces, Social Science Research, The Sociological Quarterly, Community, Work, and Family, Racial and Ethnic Studies, and Current Sociology.

Patricia Munro

2014–2015

Visiting Faculty

Avishai Benish
The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Visiting Professor of Israeli Law and Society
Legal Studies
Associate Professor, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Head of B.S.W Program

Avishai Benish is Assistant Professor at the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His fields of expertise are public law, welfare law and social policy, and his main research is on the impact of welfare state governance reforms (such as privatization and performance management) on accountability, social rights and administrative justice. Avishai graduated with honors from the Hebrew University, receiving an LL.B. in Law and Political Science; he is also an honors graduate of the LL.M. program at Columbia University Law School. He has published in journals such as Law and Policy, Public Administration and Social Service Review, and he currently serves as co-editor (with Professor David Levi-Faur) of the Jerusalem Papers on Regulation & Governance working papers series. His current research is on the regulation of privatized social services through an empirical study of the institutional dynamics of extending public law to private welfare contractors and the impact of marketization on the role and practices of street-level professionals. Avishai is also leading a research study (with Professor Shimon Shapiro) on the inspection of social services and the implications of inspectors’ professional background on the goals and style of their regulatory enforcement.

Itay Fischhendler
Geography
Professor, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Economics and Strategy (Coller School of Management)

Itay Fischhendler heads the Environmental and Planning program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests focus on environmental conflict resolution; natural resources governance and decision making under conditions of political and environmental uncertainties. He is a leading scholar on transboundary water institutions and Middle Eastern water policy, and has published over 30 articles in leading public policy, conflict resolution, peace studies, geography, ecological economics, and environmental journals. Itay is now engaged in research related to energy infrastructure along the Israeli coastal line.

Shira Offer
Professor of Sociology, Bar-Ilan University

Visiting Scholars

Ori Aronson

Dr. Ori Aronson is an Assistant Professor at the Bar-Ilan Faculty of Law, where is is also a founding member of the Center for Democratic and Jewish Law. Ori recieved an LL.B from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and LL.M and S.J.D degrees from Harvard Law School. He has also served as a law clerk to Israeli Supreme Court Chief Justice, Aharon Barak, as well as to Judge Jon O. Newman (United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit). His research interests include constitutional law and civil procedure, with a special interest in political and constitutional implications of the institutional design of court systems. While in Berkeley, he will continue his research in the complex set of questions that arise out of the design of democratic institutions.

Maya Benish-Weisman

Dr. Maya Benish-Weisman is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Counseling and Human Development, University of Haifa. She received her PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Psychology Department at the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. Her academic research focuses on how context affects people, especially children and their development. Specifically, she researches the psychological effect of context change including traveling between contexts such as in case of immigration or negotiation between contexts like for minorities. She currently leads a longitudinal study about the relationship between values and social behavior among adolescents in educational context. She will hold a joint visiting scholar appointment with the Berkeley Institute and the School of Education at Berkeley.

Leron Dean-Fishhendler

Leron Dean is a doctoral candidate at the Federmann School of Public Policy and Government at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research topics are food policies to promote healthy diet and she will have a joint appointment with the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies. Leron received her Master’s Degree in environmental studies and biology at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem. Prior to starting her PhD Leron worked for seven years at the Ministry of Environmental Protection dealing with issues of biodiversity and the delicate interface between conservation and development while planning in rural areas. Her current research focuses on if, how and why health considerations are incorporated into food policy.

Shay Hazkani

Shay Hazkani is a doctoral candidate in the joint program of the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and the Department of History at New York University (NYU). Originally from Israel, Shay received his Master’s Degree in Arab Studies from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University and his B.A in Middle Eastern Studies from Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on subaltern and socio-cultural history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Prior to starting his Masters, Shay worked for seven years as a West Bank correspondent and as a war correspondent for Israeli radio and television, where he covered the Second Intifada, the 2005 Israeli pull-out from Gaza and the 2006 war in Lebanon. Besides reporting on the daily clashes, Shay took special interest in human rights issues and the Israeli settler movement. Shay was also a visiting scholar during the 2013-2014 academic year.

Hila Shamir

Dr. Hila Shamir is an Associate Profesor at the Buchman Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University. She has also served as a Visiting Professor at Cornell Law School and as Lecturer for the Harvard University Department of Government. She also served as a law clerk to Israeli Supreme Court Justice, Eliyahu Mazza. Dr. Shamir recieved her LL.B from the Tel Aviv School of Law, and her LL.M and S.J.D. degrees from Harvard. She has studied the divison of law between the family, the market, and the state and the distributive effects of various institutional arrangements on gender and class inequality. Dr. Shamir will be researching for a book project about the ‘Law of Care,’ which will be a comparative study between Israel, the United States, and Austrailia. She will be exploring the regulation of (traditionally) women’s paid and unpaid care work. She hopes to reveal the similarities and variations that exist between the three states and the potential for market-based provision of welfare in the age of globalization.

Adi Youcht

Adi Youcht is a Doctoral Candidate at the Buchman Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University, where she also received her LL.M, LL.B, and BA. As a Doctoral Candidate, she has served as a Research Fellow at the Edmond S. Safra Center for Ethics. Adi will be studying the effects of circumcision regulation outside of Israel in comparison to Israel’s non-regulation policies. She will be exploring the relationship between the Jewish-Muslim coalition regarding circumsion in Israel and the effects that circumcision policies have had on international and translational law. Adi has also been a visiting scholar at the Columbia School of Law and McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific.

2013–2014

Visiting Faculty

Sharon Aronson-Lehavi
Theatre Researcher at the Department of Theatre Arts, Faculty of Arts – Tel Aviv University

Dr. Sharon Aronson-Lehavi is the 2013-2014 Lisa and Douglas Goldman Visiting Israeli Professor. She will be teaching courses in the departments of Comparative Literature; Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS); and Near Eastern Studies (NES). Prof. Aronson-Lehavi is a tenured Senior Lecturer of Theatre and Performance Studies at the Department of Comparative Literature, Bar Ilan University, and a member of the Israel Young Academy (IYA), established by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. She holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her past awards and distinctions include a Fulbright grant for doctoral studies, a Dan David post-doctoral research award, and the 2012 award for Excellence in Teaching, Bar Ilan University.

Prof. Aronson-Lehavi specializes in theatre and performance history and theory. Her primary areas of research are late medieval theatre, modern theatre and performance, theatre and religion, and Jewish and Israeli theatre and performance. She is the author of Gender and Feminism in Modern Theatre, (Open University Press, 2013; Hebrew); Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, New Middle Ages Series, 2011); and the editor of Wanderers and Other Israeli Plays (Seagull Books, In Performance Series, 2009), an anthology of seven contemporary Israeli plays in English translation with an introduction by the editor. Her essays have appeared in Performance Research, Theatre Research International, Performance and Spirituality, and other journals and books. Her current research project deals with religious representations in modern experimental theatre and performance.

Amnon Lehavi
Atara Kaufman Professor, Harry Radzyner Law School
Academic Director of the Gazit-Globe Real Estate Institute, Reichman University

Prof. Amnon Lehavi (Yale, J.S.D) is the 2013-2014 Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Visiting Professor of Israeli Law and Society. He will be teaching Comparative Constitutional Law: The Case of Israel. He is the Atara Kaufman Professor of Real Estate, Radzyner School of Law, and Academic Director, Gazit-Globe Real Estate Institute, Interdisciplinary Centre (IDC) Herzliya, Israel. Prof. Lehavi is a leading authority on property, real estate, land use controls, international economic law, and law and globalization. He is the author of The Construction of Property: Norms, Institutions, Challenges (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and the editor of Gated Communities (Nevo Press, 2010). Prof. Lehavi has published extensively in top journals, including the Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Texas Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Minnesota Law Review, Law and Social Inquiry, and Yale Journal of International Law. He has won numerous prizes, including the 2007 Tzeltner Award for an outstanding young scholar and the 2008 and 2010 IDC Award for excellence in scholarship. Prof. Lehavi also served as the Chairperson of the Israeli Association of Private Law (2012–2013).

Visiting Scholars

Shay Hazkani

Osnat Grady-Schwartz

Osnat Grady-Schwartz is a PhD candidate in the faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her dissertation examines the growing visibility of international law in domestic courts’ decisions, and its relation to the global expansion of judicial power, from both a macro-level (courts as institutions) and a micro-level (individual judges as the decision-makers) perspective. Her research is interdisciplinary, encompassing several theories of international law and international relations, and also combines traditional legal methodology with empirical legal studies. While at the Institute, Osnat will primarily study the impact of international human rights law on Israel’s constitutional revolution. This will be Osnat’s second year with the Institute, she spent 2012-2013 as a Fulbright Scholar.

2012–2013

Visiting Faculty

Barak Medina
Professor of Law, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Justice Haim H. Cohn Chair in Human Rights Law

Barack Medina is the the outgoing Dean of the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Medina earned his LLB, and his BA and MA in Economics from Tel-Aviv University, an LLM from Harvard Law School, and a PhD in Economics from The Hebrew University. He joined the Hebrew University Law Faculty in 2003, and served as its Dean from 2009-2012. He has authored the authoritative book on Israeli constitutional law, and is a scholar of the economic analysis of law. His latest book, Law, Economics, and Morality, was published by Oxford University Press in 2010.At Berkeley, Medina will teach a seminar on Law, Economics and Morality at the Law School, and will teach Israeli constitutional law in the Legal Studies Program.

Yaacov Yadgar
Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies, Bar Ilan University

Yaacov Yadgar teaches in the Department of Political Science at Bar Ilan University in Israel. Yadgar received his PhD from Bar Ilan, where he studied with Israel Prize winner Charles Liebman, leading analyst of the Israeli and American Jewish communities. Yadgar is a scholar of religious identity, politics, and culture in Israel. His latest book, “Secularism and Religion in Jewish-Israeli Politics (2011),” focuses on the failure of the “religious vs. secular” discourse to capture accurately the complexity of Jewish identity–not least because that discourse ignores the “masortim” (traditionists) who comprise over a third of the Jewish-Israeli population. In UC Berkeley’s Political Science Department, Yadgar will teach undergraduate and graduate seminars on Israeli Political Culture and Religion in Politics, and a lecture course on Religion and Politics in Israel (Spring 2013). He will also teach “History of Zionism” in the Department of History (Fall 2012).

Leon Wiener Dow
Research Fellow and Faculty Member at Shalom Hartman Institute

Leon Wiener Dow received his B.A. from Princeton University, M.A. in Jewish Thought from the Hebrew University, rabbinic ordination from Rabbi David Hartman, and a PhD in philosophy from Bar Ilan University. His research seeks to develop a philosophy of halacha (Jewish Law) based on the thought of Franz Rosenzweig. At Berkeley, Wiener Dow will teach undergraduate courses on “Modern Jewish Thought” and “Israeli Culture Through Film.”

Visiting Scholars

Omer Dekel

Omer Dekel is a Senior Lecturer at the Academic Center of Law & Business in Israel and the former Dean of the Academic Center’s Law School. In addition to his work at the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israeli Law, Economy and Society, Omer is also a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. During his visit he will continue his research on the connection between Cognitive Psychology, Economics, and Law in the scope of government procurement.

Omer Tene

Omer Tene is an Associate Professor at the College of Management School of Law, Rishon Le Zion, Israel and a Visiting Fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. He is also Affiliate Scholar at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society; Senior Fellow at the Future of Privacy Forum; and Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology. He has published numerous articles about privacy and data protection. He is Managing Director of Tene & Associates, where he consults the Israeli government, data protection authority and private sector businesses ranging from technology start-ups to Fortune 100 companies in the financial, health, telecom, mobile and online industries on privacy, data protection and law and technology issues. He is a graduate of the JSD and LL.M. programs at NYU School of Law and received an MBA degree from INSEAD as well as LL.M. and LL.B. degrees from Tel Aviv University.

Osnat Grady-Schwartz
Fulbright Scholar

2011–2012

Visiting Faculty

Nurit Novis-Deutsch
Lecturer of Learning and Instructional Sciences, University of Haifa

Nurit Novis-Deutsch, whose research focuses on the study of identity, psychology of religion, and moral development, received her PhD in psychology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.Her current research focuses on the religious identity of Bay Area Jews, and this year she is teaching a freshman seminar on “Jewish Collective Identity and Memory” (Jewish Studies 39E), as well as two courses, “The Israeli Experience – Explorations in Psychology of Identity,” and “Psychology of Religion,” in the Department of Psychology, and lecturing in History of Israel (History 100.2)

Menachem Hofnung
Professor of Political Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Menachem Hofnung is Herbert Samuel Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research covers national security and civil liberties, constitutional politics and comparative political finance, and at Berkeley he taught “Democracy, Civil Liberties and National Security: Israel in Comparative Perspective,” to Legal Studies and Political Science undergraduates. Hofnung has served as President of the Israeli Law and Society Association, and a member of the National Commission on the Structure of Governmental Administration in Israel (Magidor Commission, 2006). He is the incoming President of the Association for Israel Studies.

Meirav Mishali-Ram

Dr. Meirav Mishali-Ram is a lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University. She received her Ph.D. from Bar Ilan University in 2004. Her dissertation, guided by Prof. Michael Brecher from McGill University, focused on international crises in the Arab-Israel and the India-Pakistan protracted conflicts. She did her Post-Doctorate with Prof. Jonathan Wilkenfeld at the University of Maryland. She is a research fellow in the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), in Herzliya, and has long been a research associate of the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project. She is an author of several journal articles in international relations, and her main fields of interest are ethnic conflict, regional studies and civil war, applied in worldwide conflicts. Currently her research focuses on the sub-national and transnational dimensions of the conflicts in South Asia, mainly in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Visiting Scholars

Raphael (Rafi) Bitton
PhD. Candidate, Zvi Meitar Center of Advanced Legal Studies, Tel-Aviv Law School

Rafi Bitton's research is titled: “Justifying Espionage – On the Law & Ethics of Justifying Human Intelligence”. While at the Institute he will focus on issues of law and national security and will also work on research that explores the questions of law, Science & Faith.

Dr. Yaad Rotem
Assistant Professor at the Center of Law & Business in Ramat Gan, Israel
Academic Director of the Business Law Program

At Berkeley, Yaad is also a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. During his visit he will continue to work on his research which is mainly focused on corporate bankruptcy law, and the conflict of laws (private international law).