Select Former Brandeis Faculty
Following are select faculty that taught at the Summer Institute Brandeis seminar, as of 2004.
RIFAT AZAM Azam is a faculty member of the Radzyner School of Law at IDC Herzliya. His teaching and research interests include Tax Law, International Taxation, Tax Policy, Cyberspace Law and E-commerce Taxation. He was a Michigan Grotius Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan Law School (2007) and a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School (2004). Prior to joining IDC, he served as intern and senior legal assistant of the Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak. Azam received his LLD in Law from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2006) where he also received his LLM cum laude (2001) and LLB (1996). His innovative thesis discussed the international taxation of e-commerce in interdisciplinary methodology, which integrated tax law, cyberspace law, international law and political science and made original and significant contribution to the literature.
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.”
DONNA DIVINE is the Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Government at Smith College where she teaches a variety of courses on Middle East Politics. Fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and Turkish, she has held visiting appointments at Yale, Harvard, and the Hebrew University as well as fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and a several Fulbright grants. Author of many scholarly articles on a variety of topics in Middle East history and politics, she has also written “Women Living Change: Cross-Cultural Perspectives,” in “Essays from the Smith College Research Project on Women and Social Change”; “Politics and Society in Ottoman Palestine: The Arab Struggle for Survival and Power,” and “Postcolonial Theory and The Arab-Israeli Conflict.” Her most recent book, “Exiled in the Homeland: Zionism and the Return to Mandate Palestine,” was recently published in a paperback and electronic edition. In 2014 she co-edited, with Ilan Troen, “Zionism in the Twenty-First Century.”
TUVIA FRILING, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Friling is Professor, Senior Researcher and former Head of the Ben-Gurion Research Institute, at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He was the State Archivist of Israel from 2001-2004 and has held visiting research positions at Oxford University, the University of Maryland and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, amongst others. In 2003-2004 he served as Vice Chairman of the International Commission of the Holocaust in Romania, headed by Professor Elie Wiesel. He has published dozens of articles in Israel and abroad on his fields of expertise: Zionist movement policy; Ben-Gurion’s leadership; The Yishuv and the Holocaust; The Revisionist movement – the right wing movements in the Yishuv and their connection to aid and rescue during the Holocaust. His monograph The Story of a Capo in Auschwitz: History, Memory and Politics will be published in 2014 as part of the Schusterman Series in Israel Studies. At Brandeis in 2013-2014, he is a Visiting Professor in the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies and the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies.
NURITH GERTZ, The Open University of Israel and Sapir College
Gertz is professor emeritus of Literature and Cinema at the Open University and the head of the department of culture at Sapir College. Her book publications include “Motion Fiction: Literature and Cinema” (1993 [Hebrew]); “Not From Here” (El Ma Shenamog (1997, [Hebrew]); “Myths in Israeli Culture” (2000); “A Different Chorus – Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others in Israeli Cinema and Literature” (2004 [Hebrew]); and “Landscape in Mist: Space and Memory in Palestinian Cinema” (2008 [Hebrew]) with George Khleifi. Her most recent publication is “Unrepentant: Four Chapters in the Life of Amos Kenan” (2008 [Hebrew]).
JOSHUA R. JACOBSON, Northeastern University and Hebrew College
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 and acting dean of the School 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. He is co-author of Translations and Annotations of Choral Repertoire - Volume IV: Hebrew Texts, published by Earthsongs in 2009.
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.
DAVID POLLOCK, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Pollock is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, focusing on the political dynamics of Middle Eastern countries. Previously, he served as senior advisor for the Broader Middle East at the State Department, a post he assumed in 2002. In that capacity, he provided policy advice on issues of democracy and reform in the region, with a focus on women’s rights. He also helped launch the department’s $15 million Iraqi Women’s Democracy Initiative and the US-Afghan Women’s Council, working directly with advocates across the Middle East. Previously, he was chief of Near East/South Asia/Africa research at the US Information Agency, where he supervised the government’s study of public opinion, elite attitudes and media content across the three regions. In 1995-1996, he was a scholar-in-residence at The Washington Institute, where he authored the widely read Policy Paper “The ‘Arab Street’? Public Opinion in the Arab World.” Pollock has served as a visiting lecturer at Harvard University and an assistant professor at George Washington University.
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 published, in Hebrew, the collected letters of Manya Shohat (2005).
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); “Israel: 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]).
ASSAF SHELLEG, University of Virginia
Shelleg is a visiting assistant professor of Musicology and Jewish Studies at the University of Virginia in the Department of Religious Studies. He received his PhD in Musicology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include 20th century music, modern Jewish art music, Israeli art music, and musicological historiography. He was previously the Efroymson Visiting Israeli Professor at the Washington University in St. Louis and a adjunct lecturer at the Hebrew University. His forthcoming article, “Israeli Art Music: A Reintroduction,” will be published in “Israel Studies” in 2012. In addition, he has several articles under review in journals such as “Music Quarterly” and “Twentieth Century Music.”
KHALIL SHIKAKI, Brandeis University and Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research
Shikaki is a senior fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University and director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah since 2000. Having conducted more than one hundred and fifty polls among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1993, he is considered a world-renowned expert on Palestinian public opinion. Since 2000, he has conducted more than 30 joint surveys of Palestinian and Israeli attitudes with Yaacov Shamir from the Hebrew University. A widely published author, he has taught at Birzeit University, An-Najah National University, the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, the University of South Florida, and was a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. His publications include “Palestinian and Israeli Public Opinion: The Public Imperative During the Second Intifada” with Yaacov Shamir, Indiana University Press, 2010; “Middle East Brief 39”: "The Obama Presidency and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict" co-authored with Shai Feldman (Crown Center 2008), “Palestinian Public Opinion and the Peace Process: Long Term Trends and Policy Implications” (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2005), and “The Future of Palestine,” “Foreign Affairs” (November-December 2004).
SAMMY SMOOHA, University of Haifa
Smooha is professor of sociology and former dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Haifa, as well as former president of the Israeli Sociological Society. He was a visiting professor of Sociology at Brandeis for the fall 2010 semester and spent the 2009-2010 academic year as a Senior Research Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. The Israel Prize laureate for Sociology in 2008, Smooha specializes in ethnic relations in the world and Israel. He has published widely on the internal divisions and conflicts in Israeli society, especially on the relations between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim and between Arab and Jewish citizens. His books include “Israel: Pluralism and Conflict”t (1978); “Arabs and Jews in Israel” (1989, 1992); and “The Fate of Ethnic Democracy in Post-Communist Europe” (2005, co-editor). He is currently writing a book on how Israel treats its Arab minority compared to how Northern Ireland, Estonia, Slovakia and Macedonia treat their national minorities.
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 “Intifada.”
REBECCA STEINFELD, London School of Economics
Steinfeld is a political scientist researching the politics of reproduction and genital alteration. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Middle East Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre of the Body at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is also a BBC and Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) ‘New Generation Thinker,’ and blogs for the Jewish World Section of Haaretz. Steinfeld completed her PhD in Politics at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, in 2012, and in 2016, was writing her first book, Wars of the Wombs: Struggles over Reproduction in Israel (Stanford University Press). In 2014, she was a lecturer and visiting scholar in the Department of History at Stanford University. From 2011-13, she was a teaching fellow and visiting lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham, where she taught courses on the diplomatic history and politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict. She is a member of several scholarly associations, including the British International Studies Association (BISA), Political Studies Association (PSA), Feminist and Women’s Studies Association (FWSA) and National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA).
MIRI TALMON, Tel Aviv University
Talmon is a scholar of media culture, cinema, and television who specializes in Israeli cultural history and comparative approaches to Israeli and American culture. She is the author of Israeli Graffiti: Nostalgia, Groups and Collective Identity in Israeli Cinema (Haifa University Press and the Open University Press, 2001), and co-editor of the anthology Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion (University of Texas Press, 2011). Her research focuses on popular media culture (mostly film and television), identity politics in the media, and representations of cultural history in the media and the arts. Talmon teaches in the graduate program of the Department of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, where she specializes in television research and theory. As Head of the Communication and Film Studies Program at the Nazareth Academic Institute, she brings to her work a vision of academic studies which facilitates encounters and dialog among students from diverse religious, ethnic, and national communities in Israeli society. In 2013-2014, she was the Schusterman Visiting Professor of Israel Studies at Smith College.
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.