• Research
• BRANDEIS HOME

Select Faculty Presenters at Brandeis

Gannit Ankori is on sabbatical leave from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Art History. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University and a Visiting Associate Professor at Tufts University/ School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She has published two books and numerous articles on Frida Kahlo and curated the acclaimed museum exhibition "Frida Kahlo's Intimate Family Picture" [http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/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. Her book, Palestinian Art, was published by Reaktion Books, London, in 2005.

Arnold J. Band has taught modern Hebrew and Jewish literature primarily at the University of California at Los Angeles, with visiting periods at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, Yale University, and Brandeis University. He has trained over 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.

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 forthcoming in Summer 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 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.

Shai Feldman is the Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University.  In 1997-2005 he served as head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. In 2001-2003 he served as a member of the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. Dr. Feldman is the author of numerous publications including Israeli Nuclear Deterrence: A Strategy for the 1980s (Columbia University Press, 1982); The Future of U.S.-Israel Strategic Cooperation (The Washington Institute for Near East Policy,1996); Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control in the Middle East (MIT Press, 1997); Bridging the Gap: A Future Security Architecture for the Middle East (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997) with Abdullah Toukan; and Track-II Diplomacy: Lessons from the Middle East (MIT Press, 2003) with Hussein Agha, Ahmad Khalidi, and Zeev Schiff.

Nurith Gertz is a professor of Literature and Cinema at the Open University and Tel Aviv University. Her recent book publications include Motion Fiction: Literature and Cinema (The Open University, 1993 [Hebrew]); Not From Here (El Ma Shenamog) (Am Oved, 1997 [Hebrew]); Myths in Israeli Culture (Vallentine Mitchell, 2000); Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others in Israeli Cinema and Literature (Am Oved, 2004 [Hebrew]); and Landscape in Mist: Space and Memory in Palestinian Cinema (Am Oved, 2006 [Hebrew]) with George Khleifi.

Motti Inbari is the Schusterman Visiting Israel Scholar at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. He teaches courses on messianism and the State of Israel.  His book Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount is forthcoming with Magnes Press (in Hebrew).  Inbari is the co-editor of "Who  Is a Jew"  in Our Days? Discussions on Jewish Identity (Tel Aviv: 2005), and The War of Gog and Magog: Messianism and Apocalypse in the Past and in  Modern Times (Tel Aviv: 2001).  His article, “Religious Zionism and the Temple Mount Dilemma,” will appear in the forthcoming issue of the journal Israel Studies.

Joshua R. Jacobson, 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 Reinharz 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. In 2001 Dr. Reinharz left the Women’s Studies Program to launch the Women’s Studies Research Center in a 10,000 square foot facility on campus that she designed and for which she raised all of the funds.Born in Amsterdam, the child of Holocaust survivors, she grew up in the United States and has also lived in Israel.  She received her B.A. from Barnard College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Brandeis University.

Dr. Reinharz is the author or editor of many books.  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 is Senior Research Fellow of the Moshe Dayan Centre for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel-Aviv University. Israel's leading expert on the state's Arab minority, Dr. Rekhess is the Director of the Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. His recent publications include Arab Politics in Israel at a Crossroads (Tel Aviv, 1996); The Arabs in Israeli Politics - Dilemmas of Identity (Tel Aviv, 1997); "The Arabs of Israel after Oslo: Localization of the National Struggle," Israel Studies, 7.3 (Fall 2002); and The Status of the Arab Minority in the Jewish Nation State (Tel Aviv, 2004). He previously served in government on issues dealing with Israel's Arab sector, and is a consultant and commentator on Israel's minority population as well as the politics of the Middle East.

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.