Select Faculty Presenters at Brandeis
Gannit Ankori is visiting professor of Art History at Brandeis University. She is the Henya Sharef Professor of Humanities at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she served as chair of the Department of Art History before coming to Brandeis. Ankori curated the acclaimed museum exhibition “Frida Kahlo’s Intimate Family Picture.” Her forthcoming English-language book Frida Kahlo will join her two books and numerous articles on Kahlo. She has taught and lectured about Israeli and Palestinian art for many years and has published extensively on the visual representation of gender-related issues, the construction of identity, exile, trauma, and hybridity. Ankori won a Polonsky Prize for Originality and Creativity in the Humanistic Disciplines for her book Palestinian Art.
Arnold J. Band has taught modern Hebrew and Jewish literature primarily at UCLA, with visiting periods at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, Yale University, and Brandeis University. He has trained more than 20 scholars in modern Hebrew literature. Best known for his pioneering work on S.J. Agnon, his publications range over the entire field of modern Hebrew literature and also deal with the Hasidic tale and such modern Jewish writers as Franz Kafka and Sigmund Freud. Many of his essays were recently collected in Studies in Modern Jewish Literature in the Jewish Publication Society's Scholars of Distinction series. He has recently published a collection of his Hebrew essays, She’elot Nikhbadot, and a series of literary introductions to 36 Psalms.
Mitchell Bard is the Executive Director of the nonprofit American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) and the director of the Jewish Virtual Library (www.JewishVirtualLibrary.org) an online encyclopedia of Jewish history and culture. For three years he was the editor of the Near East Report, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's (AIPAC) weekly newsletter on U.S. Middle East policy. Prior to working at AIPAC, Bard served as a senior analyst in the polling division of the 1988 Bush campaign. He has written and edited 18 books including Myths And Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict; On One Foot: A Middle East Guide for the Perplexed or How to Respond on Your Way to Class When Your Best Friend Joins an Anti-Israel Protest; and The Founding of Israel. His book Will Israel Survive? is published in 2007. Bard is also the author/editor of six studies published by AICE including Rewriting History in Textbooks and Tenured or Tenuous: Defining the Role of Faculty in Supporting Israel on Campus.
Steven Bayme is the director of the Contemporary Jewish Life Department of the American Jewish Committee and of the Institute on American Jewish-Israeli Relations. He holds the rank of visiting associate professor of History at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and has lectured widely across the country and taught at Yeshiva University, Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College and Queens College. He has published articles on family policy, intermarriage, liberal Judaism, Jewish parenting, Jewish responses to modernity, Jewish attitudes on terrorism and violence and modern Orthodoxy in America. He has edited a volume of essays on American Jewry entitled Facing the Future: Essays on Contemporary Jewish Life, is co-editor of a volume entitled Rebuilding the Nest: A New Commitment to the American Family, and is co-editor of The Jewish Family and Jewish Continuity. His volume Understanding Jewish History: Texts and Commentary is widely used in adult education. His most recent publication, Jewish Arguments and Counter-Arguments, was published by Ktav. He is currently co-editing (with Steven Katz) a festschrift in honor of Yitz Greenberg.
Uri Bialer is professor of International Relations at the Hebrew University and holder of the Maurice B. Hexter Chair in International Relations – Middle Eastern Studies. He is former director of Yad Ben Zvi Institute for the Study of Eretz Israel, visiting fellow at St. Antony’s College Oxford, at the British Academy, at Harvard University, and visiting professor at the University of Chicago and at Monash University. Publications include The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics 1932–1939 (1980); Between East and West: Israel's Foreign Policy Orientation 1948-56, Cambridge University Press (1990); Oil and the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1948–67 (1999); and Cross on the Star of David: The Christian World in Israel’s Foreign Policy 1948–67 (2005).
Shai Feldman is the Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Before joining the Crown Center, Feldman served from 1997 to 2005 as head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. He also serves on the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and as a member of the Board of Directors of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. From 2001 to 2003, he served as a member of the U.N. Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. The author of numerous publications, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
Nurith Gertz is a professor of literature and cinema at the Open University and the head of theoretical studies at Tel Aviv University. Her book publications include Motion Fiction: Literature and Cinema (1993 [Hebrew]); Not From Here (El Ma Shenamog (1997, [Hebrew]); Myths in Israeli Culture (2000); Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others in Israeli Cinema and Literature (2004 [Hebrew]); and Landscape in Mist: Space and Memory in Palestinian Cinema (2006 [Hebrew]) with George Khleifi. Her most recent publication is Unrepentant: Four Chapters in the Life of Amos Kenan (2008 [Hebrew]).
Joshua R. Jacobson is one of the foremost authorities on Jewish choral music, is professor of Music and Director of Choral Activities at Northeastern University and visiting professor of Jewish Music at Hebrew College. He is also founder and director of the Zamir Chorale of Boston. His many musical arrangements, editions and compositions are frequently performed by choirs around the world. He is the conductor and host of the PBS film, Zamir: Jewish Voices Return to Poland. His book, Chanting the Hebrew Bible: The Art of Cantillation, was published by the Jewish Publication Society in 2002.
Menachem Lorberbaum chairs the department of Hebrew Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University and is co-director of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Center for Jewish Political Thought. Lorberbaum deals with questions of political theory and writes about the relationship between religion, state and politics in the Jewish tradition. His book Politics and Limits of Law: Secularizing the Political Medieval Jewish Thought was published by Stanford University Press (2001) and a Hebrew edition was published by the Hartman Institute. Authority, the first book of his four-volume work The Jewish Political Tradition (coedited with Michael Walzer and Noam Zohar, and Yair Lorberbaum), was published in 2000 by Yale University Press and Membership, the second volume, was published in 2003 (co-editor, Ari Ackerman). He has recently edited the new Hebrew translation of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (forthcoming, Shalem Press) and has also published three volumes of Hebrew verse.
Shulamit (Shula) Reinharz is the Jacob Potofsky Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University. Director of the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Program during the decade of the 90’s, she founded the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in 1997 and the Women’s Studies Research Center in 2001. With Mark Raider she edited the anthology American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise (2005) which explains the role of American Jewish Women is supporting the creation of the State of Israel. With Penina Adelman and Ali Feldman she co-authored The JGirl’s Guide (2005) designed to help Jewish girls cope with everyday life. With her husband Jehuda Reinharz she recently published, in Hebrew, the collected letters of Manya Shohat (2005).
Elie Rekhess specializes in the study of Israeli politics and society, the Arab minority in Israel, Jewish-Arab relations, Palestinian politics, and the Islamic resurgence in the West Bank and Gaza. He is a senior research fellow in the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University, and the head of its Program on Jewish-Arab Cooperation in Israel (sponsored by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung). As of January 2009 he is the Visiting Crown Chair in Middle East Studies at Northwestern University and co-chair of its Middle East Forum. His most recent publications include Arab Youth in Israel: Caught between Prospects and Risk, with A. Rudnitsky eds. (2008); The Arab Minority in Israel and the 17th Knesset Elections (2007), and Together but Apart: Mixed Cities in Israel (2007).
Sharon Rivo is the co-founder and executive director of the National Center for Jewish Film. Educated at Brandeis and with a graduate degree in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, she began her career in television as a film producer for WGBH-TV, Boston. She has worked in the field of Jewish film and media for thirty years. Recognized nationally and internationally as an authority, she has been an invited lecturer at scores of venues including Norte Dame, Bowdoin College, University of California at Santa Cruz, the Barbican Centre in London, the Jerusalem Film Festival, the University of Wisconsin, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, and the University of Stockholm in Sweden.
Gabriel (Gabi) Sheffer is a professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He served as director of The Jerusalem Group of National Planning at the Jerusalem Van Leer Foundation, director of The Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and editor of the /Jerusalem Journal for International Relations/ (English) and /State, Government and International Relations/ (Hebrew). He was awarded the Prime Minister Prize for his biography of Moshe Sharett, and received the Israeli Political Science Association award for his book on diasporas. He has edited three special issues of /Israel Studies/ (Indiana University Press). He has published many books and articles on Israeli politics, the Arab-Israeli conflict and on ethno-national diasporas in general and on the Jewish diaspora in particular, including /Moshe Sharett, Biography of a Political Moderate/ (Oxford University Press, 1996); /The National Security of Small States in a Changing World/ (Frank Cass, 1998); I/srael: The Dynamics of Change and Continuity/ (Frank Cass, 1999); /Middle Eastern Minorities and Diasporas/ (Sussex Academic Press, 2002); and /Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad/ (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and /Who Governs the Jewish People? Israeli-Diaspora Relations/ (Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 2006 [Hebrew]).
Eugene R. Sheppard is associate professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought at Brandeis University in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. He serves as the associate director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry at Brandeis University and has served as visiting assistant professor at Harvard University. His research interests include the development of hermeneutics, political theology and philosophy, and the dynamics of cultural and intellectual transmission. His book Leo Strauss and Politics of Exile: The Making of A Political Philosopher was published by Brandeis University Press in 2006. He is the co-editor of The Early Leo Strauss. His recent articles include, "Raising Zionism to the Level of Antisemitism: Leo Strauss as a Young Zionist" in Jewish Studies Quarterly (forthcoming); "'I am a Memory Come Alive: Nahum Glatzer and the Legacy of German Jewish Thought in America," in Jewish Quarterly Review and "Babylon and Jerusalem: The Integrity of the Diasporic Critical Mind," in Sh'ma (December 2004).
Sammy Smooha is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Research Fellow at the Jewish-Arab Center, University of Haifa. He specializes in minority rights in multi-ethnic societies, Israeli society, Arab-Jewish relations in Israel, the division between Middle-Eastern and European Jews, and the implications of the peace process for Israeli society. His most recent work focuses on the ethnic nature of Israeli democracy in a comparative perspective. He has widely published on the internal divisions in Israel. His books include Israel: Pluralism and Conflict (University of California Press, 1978); Arabs and Jews in Israel (Westview Press, Vol. 1 in 1989, Vol. 2 in 1992); and Autonomy for Arabs in Israel? (The Institute for Israeli Arab Studies, 1999 [Hebrew]). He is also the co-editor of The Fate of Ethnic Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (Open Society Foundation, 2005).
Kenneth W. Stein is William E. Schatten Professor of Contemporary Middle Eastern History, Political Science and Israeli Studies at Emory University. He founded the International Studies Center, was the first director of the Carter Center (1983-1986), established the Middle East Research Program (1992) and the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel (1997). Since 2000, Stein has conducted one-week summer teacher workshops on Israel and the Middle East in which he led a cohort of content and pedagogic experts in assisting more than 350 teachers from more than 30 states in enriching their understanding of modern Israeli history, society and politics. With the assistance of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation he and his colleagues at the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel have also conducted 10 one-day workshops for teachers in Jewish educational settings. He is the author of three books, almost a dozen book chapters, encyclopedia entries, dozens of scholarly articles and hundreds of newspaper contributions. Among his publications are Hebrew and English editions of Heroic Diplomacy: Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, Begin and the Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace (Routledge, 1999); Making Peace Among Arabs and Israelis: Lessons from Fifty Years of Negotiating Experience (United States Institute for Peace, 1991) and The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939, (North Carolina Press, 1984, 1985, and 2003). From 1996 through 1999, he wrote the chapter on the "Arab-Israeli Peace Process" in Middle East Contemporary Survey (Westview Press), and entries for Microsoft's Encarta Encyclopedia on the "PLO," "1948 Israeli Independence War," "June 1967 War," "1973 October War," "Hamas," and "Intifadah."
Yedidia Z. Stern is the vice president for research on the Jewish State at Israel Democracy Institute, where he has headed the projects on Religion and State and Business and Democracy since 1999. Stern is a full professor at Bar-Ilan University Law School, and served as its dean from 1994 to 1998. He received his LL.B. degree from Bar-Ilan Law School in 1982, and earned his master's degree (1984) and doctorate (1986) from Harvard Law School. His areas of professional interest are religion and state, Jewish law, public law, corporate law, corporate acquisitions, corporate finance and corporate governance. Stern is co-editor of the scholarly journal Democratic Culture and of the series Israeli Judaism. He is also a regular contributor to the Israeli and international press. Stern has served on numerous national committees on constitutional and commercial affairs. He was recently appointed to the Israeli Government’s Commission of Inquiry into the State's treatment of the residents of Gush Katif after the Disengagement (2009). Stern won the Zeltner Price for excellence in Legal Research in Israel in 2009.
Asher Susser is a senior fellow on the Myra and Robert Kraft Chair in Arab Politics at Brandeis University. He was director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University from 1989-1995 and from 2001-2007. One of Israel’s leading experts on Jordan and the Palestinians, Susser was the only Israeli academic invited by Prime Minister Rabin to join him and King Hussein at their historic appearance before the U.S. Congress. His most recent publications include Challenges to the Cohesion of the Arab State (ed. 2008); and Jordan: Case Study of a Pivotal State (2000).
S. Ilan Troen is Stoll Family Chair in Israel Studies at Brandeis University and Director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. He has served as Director of the Ben-Gurion Research Institute and Archives in Sede Boker, Israel. He has authored or edited eleven books in American, Jewish and Israeli history. He is also the founding editor of Israel Studies (Indiana University Press), an international journal that publishes three issues annually on behalf of Brandeis and Ben-Gurion University. His most recent book publications include Jewish Centers and Peripheries: European Jewry between America and Israel Fifty Years after World War II (Transaction, 1998); The Americanization of Israel (special issue of Israel Studies, 2001) with Glenda Abramson; Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America (Yale, 2001) with Deborah Dash-Moore; and Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement (Yale, 2003), and, with Jacob Lassner, Jews and Muslims in the Arab World; Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).
Anat Zanger is an assistant professor at the Department of Film and Television and co-chair of the MA program in Film and Television at Tel Aviv University. She is a visiting scholar at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, 2008-2009. Among her subjects are Israeli cinema, mythology, collective memory, intertextuality, space and landscape. Her publications have appeared in Semiotics, Framework, Shofar, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, and Feminist Media Studies. She is author of Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguises (Amsterdam University Press, 2006) and is currently completing a book on space in Israeli film. This project is supported by the Israeli Science Foundation (2008-2011).
Yael Zerubavel is the founding director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life and a professor of Jewish Studies and History at Rutgers University. Her major fields of interest are collective memory and identity, national myths, war and trauma, and Israeli literature and culture. She is the author of Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (1995), which won the 1996 Salo Baron Prize of the American Academy for Jewish Research, and numerous articles. She is currently completing a book entitled Desert in the Promised Land: Nationalism, Politics, and Symbolic Landscapes as well as a book based on her 2009 Stroum Lectures, Encounters with the Past: Remembering the ‘Bygone’ in Israeli Culture. She is a member of the international advisory boards of the journals Israel Studies, Journal of Israeli History, Israel Studies Forum, and Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds; and on the editorial boards of Rutgers University Press series on Jewish Cultures of the World and the Academic Studies Press, series on Israel: Society, Culture, and History.