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’

30 March 2017 “Threats to Democracy in Israel” Prof. Itzhak Galnoor  (Hebrew University Jerusalem and The Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem)
   

Prof. Itzhak Galnoor is the Herbert Samuel Professor of Political Science (emeritus) at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been a Visiting Professor at many international universities, and served on the Executive Committee of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and edited its Advances in Political Science book series, published by Cambridge University Press.
Galnoor was Head of the Civil Service Commission in the Government headed by Itzhak Rabin; A member of the Israel Science Foundation’s Executive Committee and in charge of its Humanities and Social Sciences division (2001-2007); on the Governing Board of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2003-2007); Deputy Chair of the Council for Higher Education 2007-2008. He is the head of the Israeli Political Science Association (2012-). Since 2007 he is a Senior Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Academic Director of the State Responsibility and the Limits of Privatization project at the Chazan Center for Social Justice. His book (with Dr. Dana Blander) The Israeli Political System (2013) is forthcoming in English in 2016 at Cambridge University Press.
In June 2015 Galnoor was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association of Israel Studies (AIS).

 

30 January 2017 “The Rise of the Israeli Right” Prof. Colin Shindler (SOAS, University Of London)

  

Prof. Colin Shindler is an Emeritus Professor at the School of Oriental Studies, University of London. He was the first Professor of Israel Studies in the UK and founding chair of the European Association of Israel Studies.
He is the author of numerous books about Israel including The Rise of the Israeli Right (2015). His recent publications include the second edition of his History of Modern Israel (Cambridge 2013) and Israel and the European Left (Bloomsbury 2012). His areas of expertise include both the Israeli Right as well as the European Left.
His next book The Hebrew Republic: Episodes from the History of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora will be published by Rowman and Littlefield later in 2017.
He often contributes to the international media including the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, Jerusalem Post and Ha’aretz.

5 December 2016 “God is Back: Religion and Cinema in Israel” Dr. Yaron Peleg (University of Cambridge)

   

Dr. Yaron Peleg is Kennedy-Leigh Lecturer in Modern Hebrew Studies at the University of Cambridge. His publications include Directed by God, Jewishness in Contemporary Israeli Film and Television (2016), Israeli Culture Between the Two Intifadas (2008) and Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination (2005). He is also co-editor of an anthology of articles on contemporary Israeli cinema, Identities in Motion (2011). Dr. Peleg has also published articles on topics, including literary critiques, which examine the concept of Land in modern Hebrew prose, attitudes toward militarism, homoeroticism in biblical as well as more modern Hebrew literature and various articles about Israeli cinema that focus on gender, masculinity, ethnicity and religiosity.

17 November 2016 “Killing with Words. Healing with Words: The Israeli Public Debate” Prof. Fania Oz-Salzberger (University of Haifa)

  

Prof. Fania Oz-Salzberger was recently nominated as director of PAIDEIA The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden. She is the director, The Posen Forum for Jewish European and Israeli Political Thought, Faculty of Law, University of Haifa.
Fania Oz-Salzberger is Professor of History at the Faculty of Law and the Center for German and European Studies, as well as the founding Director of the Posen Research Forum for Political Thought, at the University of Haifa. From 2007-2012 she was the Leon Liberman Chair in Modern Israel Studies at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization, Monash University. Prior to that, from 2009-2010, she was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Her books include Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1995), Israelis in Berlin (Jerusalem, 2001; Frankfurt am Main, 2001), and recently Jews and Words (Yale, 2012), co-authored with Amos Oz. She has published numerous essays on the history of ideas and political thought, most recently on translation in the European Enlightenment, on the biblical sources of John Locke and on languages and literacy in early modern Europe. She earned a B.A. and M.A., summa cum laude, from Tel Aviv University and a D.Phil. from Oxford University.

5 October 2016 “Thoughts about the Origin of Life” Nobel Laureate Prof. Ada Yonath (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel)

Nobel Laureate Prof. Ada Yonath was born in Jerusalem in 1939 to Zionist immigrants. After her father, a grocer and rabbi, died, the family moved to Tel Aviv where Ada attended Tichon Hadash High School. After military service, she entered the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, receiving a BS in chemistry in 1962 and an MS in biochemistry in 1964 before earning a PhD in X-Ray crystallography in 1968 at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Moving to America, Yonath worked at the Carnegie Mellon University and MIT together with F.A. Cotton. From 1979-84 she was a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin and headed their research unit in Hamburg from 1986–2004 as well as the Mazar Center of Structural Biology (1988-2004). She has been a professor at the Weizmann Institute since 1988, heading the Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly since 1989. She has also served as visiting professor at the University of Chicago. She is a member of the US National Academy, the Israel Academy and several European Academies (France, German, Italian, Spain, UK).
Yonath has received several awards, including the first European Crystallography Prize in 2000, the Israel Prize for chemistry in 2002 and shared the Wolf Prize in Chemistry with George Feher. The 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was shared between  Ada E. Yonath, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz, each of whom has contributed to our knowledge of the “…structure and function of the ribosome”.

12 May 2016 “From Budapest to Basel: Theodor Herzl’s Way to Zionism” Prof. Derek Penslar (University of Oxford)

   

Prof. Derek Penslar is a comparative historian with interests in the relationship between modern Israel and diaspora Jewish societies, global nationalist movements, and post-colonial states. He is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Modern Israel Studies at the University of Oxford and the Samuel J. Zacks
Professor of Jewish History at the University of Toronto. Next year he will move to Harvard, where he has accepted the William Lee Frost Chair in Modern Jewish History. Penslar is the author or editor of ten books, including Shylock’s Children Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe; Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective; The Origins of the State of Israel: A Documentary History, and Jews and the Military: A History. Penslar is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Academy for Jewish Research.