17 May 2018 “Tumbling Thoughts – Dealing with the Shoah as a Memory in Israel” Prof. Moshe Zimmermann (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
„Gedankliche Stolpersteine – Der Umgang mit der Shoah als Erinnerung in Israel“

10 April 2018 “Antisemitismus und Islamophobia” Prof. Helga Embacher  (University of Salzburg)

Prof. Helga Embacher ist Professorin am Fachbereich Geschichte an der Universität Salzburg mit den Forschungschwerpunkten Nationalsozialismus, Jüdische Geschichte, Emigration, Israel und Antisemitismus. Gastprofessorin an der University of Minnesota in Minneapolis und der PEN University in Philadelphia. Derzeit Leiterin des vom Jubiläumsfonds der österreichischen Nationalbank geförderten Forschungsprojekts: Diskurse zum Holocaustgedenken, Juden und Israel unter Muslimen im Kontext von Islamfeindlichkeit

15 March 2018 “Human Dignity in Judaism” Prof. Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth College)

Prof. Susannah Heschel is the Eli Black Professor and chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany as well as numerous edited volumes, including Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism and Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust, and over 100 articles. She has been a visiting professor at several universities, including the University of Cape Town, Frankfurt, Edinburgh, and Princeton, and has held research grants from the Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation, a Rockefeller fellowship at the National Humanities Center, and a yearlong fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and has been studying the history of European Jewish scholarship on Islam, and her first of two books on that topic will appear March 2018 under the title, Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung, and she also has an article on that topic, in English, in the Journal of Qur’anic Studies.

23 January 2018 “Nanomaterials at Interfaces” Prof. Yuval Golan (University of Tel Aviv)

Prof. Yuval Golan obtained his PhD in Materials and Interfaces from the Weizmann Institute in 1996 and spent three years as a postgraduate researcher at the Materials Research Laboratory, University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1999 he joined the Department of Materials Engineering at Ben-Gurion University and in 2010 he was promoted to full professor and appointed as Director of the Ilse Katz Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at BGU. His research interests include surfactant-assisted synthesis of nanomaterials and chemical epitaxy of semiconductor thin films. Prof. Golan is an active researcher in the area of nanomaterials and thin films, has published over 120 papers in peer-reviewed international journals and supervised some 40 junior researchers (postdocs, MSc and PhD students). Since 2016 Prof. Golan is also Chairman of Graduate Studies in the Department of Materials Engineering and Chairman of the Synchrotron Committee of the Israeli Academy of Science.

See also: Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna

27 November 2017 „Turning Points in Israeli History: From the Balfour Declaration to the Camp David Accords“. Prof. Itamar Rabinovich (chair), Prof. Shlomo Ben-Ami, Prof. Ilan Troen

Amb. Prof. Itamar Rabinovich is founding President of the Israel Institute, a Distinguished Global Professor at New York University, and Non-Resident Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Brookings Center for Middle East Policy. He is Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University and the University’s former President. Ambassador Rabinovich has been a member of the faculty of Tel Aviv University since 1971 and served as Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, Director of the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Dean of the Humanities, and Rector. From 1992-1996, he was Israel’s Ambassador to the United States and chief negotiator with Syria. Ambassador Rabinovich’s most recent books are The Lingering Conflict: Israel, The Arabs and the Middle East (2011) and The View from Damascus (2009). He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and a member of the Trilateral Commission. He earned a B.A. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an M.A. from Tel Aviv University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Prof. Shlomo Ben-Ami graduated from Tel Aviv University and St Antony’s College, Oxford. From the 1970s onwards he was a historian at Tel Aviv University, serving as head of the School of History from 1982 to 1986. 1999 he was appointed Minister of Internal Security and in addition in 2000 Foreign Minister. In 2002 he resigned from the Knesset. In 2006- 2010 Prof. Ben Ami served in the board of the International Crisis Group. He is now a member of the Crisis Group Senior Advisers. In 2009-2010 he was a member board of the Commission for Nuclear Non proliferation co-sponsored by the governments of Australia and Japan. Ben-Ami is currently Vice-President of the Toledo International Centre for Peace. His latest book is “Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli–Arab Tragedy” (published in Oxford, 2006)

Prof. Ilan Troen was born in Boston, educated at Brandeis, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the University of Chicago. Before moving to Israel in 1975 when he joined Ben-Gurion University, he was on the faculty of Missouri and Princeton. At the Ben-Gurion University he was the Lopin Professor of Modern History; Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; Director of the Ben-Gurion Research Institute and Archives in Sede Boker; and Director of the Kreitman Foundation Fellowships. At Ben-Gurion University he contributed to pioneering programs in Israel Studies and was the founding Editor of Israel Studies. He established the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies.  He has authored or edited numerous books in American, Jewish and Israeli history.
He is co-author of the following publications: “Jews and Muslims in the Arab World; Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined” Rowman and Littlefield, 2007; “Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement” Yale University Press, 2003; “Divergent Jewish Cultures: America and Israel” Yale University Press, 2001.

12 November 2017 “In Conversation with Meir Shalev” moderator: Ute Woltron (Der Standard)

Meir Shalev, geboren 1948 in Nahalal in der Jesreel-Ebene, studierte Psychologie und arbeitete viele Jahre als Journalist, Radio- und Fernsehmoderator. Er ist einer der bekanntesten und beliebtesten israelischen Romanciers und erhielt 2006 den Brenner Prize, die höchste literarische Auszeichnung in Israel. Zuletzt erschien sein Roman ›Zwei Bärinnen‹. Meir Shalev schreibt regelmäßig Kolumnen für die Tageszeitung ›Yedioth Ahronoth‹. Er lebt in Nord-Israel.

30 October 2017 “The Israeli Project: Architecture in Israel 1948-1974” Prof. Zvi Efrat (former Head of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem; partner at  Efrat-Kowalsky Architects (EKA) )
    

Prof. Dr. Zvi Efrat, Architect and Architectural Historian, is a partner at Efrat-Kowalsky Architects (EKA) and was Head of the Department of Architecture at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem (2002-2010). He studied at Pratt Institute (professional degree), NYU (Cinema Studies) and Princeton University (PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture). He has taught at several universities, lectured worldwide, published extensively and curated numerous exhibitions, among them: Borderline Disorder (The Israeli Pavilion at the 8 the Architectural Biennale, Venice, 2002) and The Object of Zionism, Swiss Architecture Museum, Basel, 2011). His book, The Israeli Project: Building and Architecture 1948-1973, was published in Hebrew in 2004. Zvi’s book “The Israel Project: The Architecture of Zionism”, is due September 2017. The Office of Efrat-Kowalsky Architects (EKA) specializes in the design of museums and in the re-programming and re-use of existing structures. Among the office recent projects: design of performing arts campus in Jerusalem; renewal and expansion of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem; preservation and new additions to the City Museum of Tel Aviv.

26 June 2017 “Heiliges oder Unheiliges Land? Religion und Staat in Israel” Prof. Michael Brenner ( Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Center for Israel Studies at the American University in Washington, D.C. 

Prof. Michael Brenner ist Professor für Jüdische Geschichte und Kultur an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München und Direktor des Center for Israel Studies an der American University in Washington, D.C. Er ist Internationaler Präsident des Leo Baeck Instituts und gewähltes Mitglied der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften sowie der Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana in Mantua. 2014 wurde ihm das Bundesverdienstkreuz am Bande verliehen. Zu seinen Buchveröffentlichungen, die in über zehn Sprachen übersetzt wurden, zählen:
Israel: Traum und Wirklichkeit des jüdischen Staates,
Kleine Jüdische Geschichte, Propheten des Vergangenen: Jüdische Geschichtsschreibung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert sowie
Jüdische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik.
U.a gab er die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland von 1945 bis in die Gegenwart heraus.

8 May 2017 “Iran, Israel and the USA in a Changing Middle East” Prof. David Menashri (Tel Aviv University)

Prof. David Menashri is Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University and Senior Research Fellow at the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies and the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University (TAU). Menashri founded and was the first Director the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies and is internationally recognized Iran scholar. He has been a visiting Fulbright scholar at Princeton and Cornell University, and, among others, a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Yale, UCLA, Oxford, Melbourne and Monash Universities (Australia), the Universities of Munich and Mainz (Germany) and Waseda (Tokyo). In the late 1970s, Menashri spent two years conducting research and field studies in Iranian universities on the eve of the Islamic Revolution with a grant from Ford Foundation. Prof. Menashri’s publications includes: Post-Revolutionary Politics in Iran: Religion, Society and Power; Revolution at A Crossroads: Iran’s Domestic Challenges and Regional Ambitions; Iran: Between Islam and the West (Hebrew); Education and the Making of Modern Iran; Iran: A Decade of War and Revolution; Iran in Revolution (Hebrew).
He is also the editor of “Iran: Anatomy of Revolution” (together with Liora Hendelman-Baavur, 2009, Hebrew); Religion and State in the Middle East (Hebrew); Central Asia Meets the Middle East; and The Iranian Revolution and the Muslim World.

27 April 2017 “Israeli Women between Sexual Harassment and Religious (Jewish and Muslim) Family Law” Prof. Orit Kamir (Center for Human Dignity)

Prof. Orit Kamir publishes, teaches and is socially active in three interdisciplinary areas: 1.Dignity, respect and honor as moral/ethical values, bedrocks of social structures, and foundations of legislation and policy making; 2. Law-and-Film: analysis of mutual influences of two powerful contemporary discourses, that have substantial impact on the creation and determination of individuals’