Prof. Orit Rozin

Prof. Orit Rozin holds the Ruhama Rosenberg Chair for the Study of Jewish History and is a faculty member in the Department of History of the Jewish People at Tel Aviv University. She also serves as the Vice Chair of the Israel Historical Society.

Her research explores the legal, cultural, and social history of Zionism and the State of Israel, with a particular focus on the history of emotions.

Prof. Rozin is the author of three acclaimed books:

–Duty and Love: Individualism and Collectivism in 1950s Israel (2008), which won the 2009 Yonatan Shapiro Prize from the Association for Israel Studies. Its English translation, The Rise of the Individual in 1950s Israel: A Challenge to Collectivism, was published by UPNE in 2011.

–A Home for All Jews: Citizenship, Rights and National Identity in the New Israeli State (2016), which was named runner-up for the 2018 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies.

–Emotions of Conflict, Israel 1949–1967 (2025), which received the Best Book Award from the European Association of Israel Studies, the Chaikin Institute Best Book Award (2025), and the Korenblat Best Book Award from the Cherrick Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2026).

Mustafa Kabha is a full professor in the Department of History, Philosophy and Judaic Studies and the head of Middle Eastern Studies at the Open University of Israel.

From his publications: Writing up the Storm: The Palestinian Press Shaping Public Opinion (London: Vallentine Mitchell Academic, 2007); (with D. Caspi) The Palestinian Arab In/Outsiders: Media and Conflict in Israel (London/Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011); The Palestinian People: Seeking Sovereignty and State (Boulder, London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013); Mustafa Kabha & Wadi‘ ‘Awawdi, Prisoners without Bayonets: The Palestinian Prisoners and the First Israeli Detention Centers, 1948–1949 (Institute for Palestine Studies, Beirut, 2013, Arabic); Mustafa Kabha, The Palestinian Names of Places and Their Connection with Space: al-Lajjun Region as an Example (The Arabic Language Academy, Haifa, 2013, Arabic). He edited Towards a Historical Narrative of the Nakba: Complexities and Challenges (Haifa: Mada, Arab Center for Applied Social Research, 2006, Arabic).

Dr. Nathan Marcus took a BA in history and economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned his PhD in Modern European History, with a dissertation on interwar Austria, at New York University. Before joining Ben-Gurion University, Dr. Marcus was a Max Weber postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, a Golda Meir postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University, and a Lecturer in Modern European History at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia. At BGU, where he directs the Center for Austrian and German Studies, his teaching and research focus is on the history of Austria, financial history, and the history of modern Europe. His monograph, Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921–1931, was published with Harvard University Press in 2018. He is currently working on a history of the Viennese Black Market from 1943 to 1948.

Asher Salah is Associate Professor at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has been a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in 2011–2012 and in 2014–2015, and at the Maimonides Center for Advanced Studies in Jewish Scepticism in 2016–2017 and 2020–2021.

His scholarship deals with Jewish literature in early modern Italy, Sephardic studies and Jewish cinema in the Mediterranean area. His publications include a translation into Italian and an analysis of Samuele Romanelli’s Masa‘ Be‘arav (Florence: Giuntina, 2006), La République des Lettres: Rabbins, médecins et écrivains juifs en Italie au XVIIIe siècle (Boston/Leiden: Brill, 2007), L’epistolario di Marco Mortara: un rabbino italiano tra riforma e ortodossia (Florence: Giuntina, 2012), Diari Risorgimentali: due ragazzi ebrei si raccontano (Livorno: Belforte, 2017), Il mondo fuori dal Ghetto: I viaggi di Moise Vita Cafsuto, gioielliere alla corte dei Medici (Turin: Claudiana, 2022), Jeremy Popkin, Asher Salah, Giuseppe Veltri (eds.), A Sceptical Jew. Richard H. Popkin’s Private Republic of Letters (Boston: Brill, 2025).

Scott Ury is Associate Professor in Tel Aviv University’s Department of Jewish History, where he is also Director of the Eva and Marc Besen Institute for the Study of Historical Consciousness and Senior Editor of the journal History & Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past. His research focuses on Jewish and East European histories in modern times, in particular in Polish lands, with an emphasis on social and political questions, including those related to urbanization, nationalism, and migration, as well as the study of antisemitism and memory.

Published by Stanford University Press, his monograph Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry was awarded the Reginald Zelnik Prize for the outstanding book in the field of history by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). He has also co-edited several volumes on various aspects of modern Jewish history, including Antisemitism and the Politics of History (Brandeis, 2024; Hebrew version, Shazar Center, 2020), Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism (Palgrave, 2021), and Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and the Jews of East Central Europe (Routledge, 2014).

He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has held fellowships or visiting positions at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Toronto, the University of Warsaw, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and, most recently, Harvard University.

Prof. Raanan Rein is the Alexander Grass Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Florida and the Elías Sourasky Professor of Latin American and Spanish History and a former Vice President of Tel Aviv University. Rein is the author and editor of more than fifty books and over a hundred and fifty articles in academic journals and edited volumes. He is a member of Argentina’s National Academy of History and a former President of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA).

He has received several honors, including the title of Commander in the Order of the Liberator San Martín, awarded by the Government of Argentina for his contribution to Argentine culture, and the title of Commander in the Order of the Civil Merit, awarded by the King of Spain. In 2016, he received the Reimar Lüst Award (co-sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation).

Professor Avriel Bar-Levav is a faculty member in the Department of History, Philosophy and Judaic Studies at The Open University of Israel. His research interests include Jewish intellectual history in the early modern period, Jewish attitudes toward death, the history of the Jewish book, Jewish magic, and egodocuments.

Together with Moshe Idel and others, he wrote An Introduction to Jewish Mysticism (4 volumes, Open University of Israel Press, Raanana 2022).

Among the books he co-edited are Derekh Sefer (The Way of the Book): A  Tribute to Ze’ev Griess (Carmel, 2021); Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Vol. 31: Textual Transmission in Modern Jewish Culture (2020); Paths to Modernity: A Tribute to Yosef Kaplan (Zalman Shazar Center, 2018); and Death in Jewish Life: Burial and Mourning Customs among Jews of Europe and Nearby Communities (De Gruyter, 2014).

He was editor of Pe’amim: Studies in Oriental  Jewry, published by the Ben-Zvi Institute, and he is co-editor of Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture (Brill).  

He is the recipient of the 2020 Am Ve-Olam Prize for an outstanding paper in history, for his paper “Textual Intimacy and the Bond of Reading between the Expulsion from Spain and Amsterdam.”

Micha J. Perry (Ph.D. Hebrew University, 2008) is a senior lecturer in medieval Jewish history at the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. His book: Tradition and Transformation: Knowledge Transmission among Medieval Jews was published in Hebrew in 2010; his second book was published by Routledge in 2019 under the title: Eldad’s Travels: From the Lost Tribes to the Present. He was the ‘Alan M. Stroock’ Fellow for Advanced Research at Harvard University (2009); and the ‘Jacob & Hilda Blaustein’ Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University (2010–2011). He won the Fulbright Fellowship (2008) as well as the Lady Davis Fellowship Trust (2011–2012). During 2018–2019, he was a Visiting Lecturer at Yale’s Judaic Studies Program and History Department.

His main areas of research are: Medieval Jewish History; Histoire des Mentalités; Sociology of knowledge; Medieval Jewish material culture; Jewish-Christian relations in Medieval Europe; and the ties between Jews in the East (under Islam and Byzantium) and Jews in the West during the Middle Ages.

Prof. Cedric Cohen-Skalli teaches Jewish philosophy at the University of Haifa. He is the Director of the Bucerius Institute for the Research of Contemporary German History and Society and Chair of the Department of Jewish History and Bible. His field of research is interreligious intellectual history. He has published several books and many articles on diverse intercultural aspects of Jewish thought and literature in the Renaissance and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His intellectual biography of Isaac Abravanel was published in Hebrew and English by Shazar and Brandeis presses. He co-edited the volumes Skepsis and Antipolitics: The Alternative of Gustav Landauer (Brill 2022) and Modern Jewish Thought on Crisis Interpretation, Heresy and History (De Gruyter 2024), Women Writing Buber (Brill, 2026) and is about to publish a new book with the title Forgotten Paths to Modernity: Isaac Abravanel, New Imperial Thinking and Critical Historiography in the Upenn Jewish Culture and Context series. He is the translator of many works and leads several initiatives on the topic: The Revival of Philosophy in the 19th-Century and Early 20th-Century Middle East and North Africa: An Untold Story.

Prof. Debra Kaplan is Professor of Jewish History and holds the Samuel Braun Chair for the History of the Jews in Germany in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University.

A social and cultural historian of the early modern period, she is the author of Beyond Expulsion: Jews, Christians and Reformation Strasbourg (Stanford University Press, 2011; Hebrew translation, Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2016; The Patrons and Their Poor: Jewish Community and Public Charity in Early Modern Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) and together with Professor Elisheva Carlebach, A Woman is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2025). Her scholarship focuses on daily life, gender, and Jewish-Christian relations.

Prof. Mustafa Abbasi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Galilee Studies at Tel-Hai University. His research focuses on two main fields:

1. Social history research of the Palestinian Arab population from the late Ottoman period until the end of the British Mandate. Most of this research examines social and political aspects of the mixed cities and the Arab towns and villages in the Galilee. Additional studies have addressed Jerusalem and Nablus and their rural surroundings.

2. Historical research of the 1948 War and the first years of the State of Israel. In this field as well, much of his research has focused on the Galilee, particularly the four cities of Safed, Acre, Nazareth, and Tiberias, and their rural surroundings.

He has published several books, including: The Cities of the Galilee During the War of 1948: Four cities and four stories. Lap Lambert Academic Publishing, 2014 (English); Arabs and Jews in a Mixed City: Safad during the Mandate period, 1918–1948. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi. 2015 (Hebrew); Living in Mandatory Palestine: Personal Narratives of Resilience of Galilee During the Mandate Period (co-authored with Roberta Green, Shira Hantman,Yair Seltenrich, and Nancy Green), Rutledge Publishing, 2018 (English). His articles include: “The War on the Mixed Cities: The Depopulation of Arab Tiberias and Destruction of its Old, Sacred City (1948–1949),” The Holy Land Studies, 1/1 (March 2008), pp. 45–80; “The Fall of Acre in the 1948 Palestine War,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 39/4 (Summer 2010), pp. 6–27; “Nazareth in the War for Palestine,” Holy Land Studies, 9/2, November 2010), pp.185– 207; “Samakh: The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Arab Town on the Shores of the Sea of Galilee,” Holy Land Studies, 12/1 (May 2013), pp. 91– 108; “The Education System in East Jerusalem During the Period of Jordanian Rule, 1948–1967,” Journal of Politics and Law, 6/4 (2013), pp.1–13; “Khalsa: The Town with a ‘Golden Fountain”: The Rise and Fall of an Arab Town North of the Huleh Valley, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History Volume 44, Issue 3, (May 2016), pp. 448–469; ”The Battle for the Galilee: Maronites and the Palestinian Village of Jish during the 1948 War,” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, Volume 15.2, (2016), pp. 249–273; “Palestinians Fighting Against Nazis: The Story of Palestinian Volunteers in the Second World War,” War in History (November 2017), pp.1–23.

Moshe Sluhovsky (PhD Princeton, 1992) is Paulette and Claude Kelman Professor emeritus of French History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he taught between 1995 and 2025. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Polonsky Academy of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

Over the years, he has won several grants and fellowships, among them Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the German-Israel Foundation (GIF), and the Einstein Foundation; the National Humanities Center in North Carolina; the Davis Center at Princeton University; and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

His books include “Believe Not Every Spirit”: Demonic Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism and Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism. He also edited several collections of articles, two of which (on 500 years of Protestant-Jewish interactions) were published in 2021.

Since 2015, he has been collaborating with Professor Andreas Krass of Humboldt University in Berlin on a joint research project on the Jewish presence in gay and lesbian Berlin during the Weimar period, and the migration of German-Jewish gay men and lesbians to Palestine in the 1930s. Two collections of articles resulting from this cooperation were published in 2021 and a third one in 2026.

Chairperson

Shmuel Feiner is Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University, member of The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Chairman of the Historical Society of Israel, former Chairman of the Jerusalem Leo Baeck Institute, and historian of European Jewry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (especially the Jewish Enlightenment and the trends of secularization and counter-modernity). Recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award (2012).

Author of Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness (Hebrew, 1995; English, 2002); The Jewish Enlightenment (Hebrew, 2002; English, 2004); Moses Mendelssohn (Hebrew, 2005; German, 2009; English, 2010; Chinese, 2014); The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Hebrew, 2010; English, 2011); The Jewish Eighteenth Century: A European Biography, 1700–1750 (Hebrew, 2017; English, 2020); The Jewish Eighteenth Century: A European Biography, 1750–1800 (University of Indiana Press, 2023); The Jewish Eighteenth Century: A European Biography, 1750–1800 (Hebrew, 2021, English 2023); The Emotional Experience of Jewish Secularization since the Early Modern Era (2026).