August 21, 2008
The Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) is pleased to offer an outstanding new resource to enhance Israel education on campuses: the Traveling Israel Scholars Program. As part of its Israel in Academia initiative, the ICC and its 33 national member organizations have committed to expanding opportunities for students to study about Israel on campus. Through the Traveling Israel Scholars Program, the ICC will work with students and campus professionals to enable high-caliber visiting Israeli scholars – on leave from their Israeli universities for a semester or a full year – to travel from their temporary U.S. universities to other American universities for several days at a time to teach in classrooms, provide guest lectures and address the campus community.
These scholars are available to visit campuses at the highly subsidized cost of only $250, with the ICC covering all other expenses including travel. Please look at the list of scholars in your region and their areas of expertise and fill out the short application.
For more information, please contact Andrea Sorin.
Traveling Scholars on the East Coast
Michal Ben-Horin
University of Florida
Professor Ben-Horin is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of African and Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Florida. She teaches courses on literary memoirs by Israeli, German-Jewish and American writers, contemporary Israeli cinema, and political poetry and public controversy in Israel, along with a new course on music and literature. Her research interests include comparative literature, modern Jewish and Hebrew literature, Israeli culture, musical theories, and poetics of memory. Ben-Horin’s current book project deals with representations of violence, narrative and musical discourse in Hebrew literature.
Anat Berko
George Washington University
Professor Berko is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Counter-terrorism (ICT) and also lectures at the Center’s Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Security, the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya (IDC), Israel. She has served on Israel’s National Security Council in the field of counter-terrorism providing insight into the criminal and moral aspects of suicide bombers. She has written extensively about various aspects of terrorism and published The Path to Paradise: The Inner World of Suicide Bombers and their Dispatchers (2007). She received her Ph.D. in Criminology from Bar-Ilan University.
Charles Freilich
Harvard University
Until recently, Charles Freilich was Israel's Deputy National Security Adviser. He is now a Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard's Kennedy School, where he is writing a book on Israeli national security decision making. Dr. Freilich's' primary areas of expertise are U.S.-Mid-East policy and Israeli national security policy. He teaches Political Science at Tel Aviv and Hebrew Universities and also co-directs a Middle Eastern affairs consultancy. Chuck has appeared as a commentator for CNN, been quoted in the NY Times, published numerous articles and appeared on various U.S. and Israeli radio and TVstations. Dr. Freilich was a Senior Analyst at the Israel Ministry of Defense, focusing on strategic affairs, Policy Advisor to a cabinet minister and a Delegate at the Israeli Mission to the UN. He was the Executive Director of two nonprofit and served in the Israel Defense Forces for five years (reserve major). Dr. Freilich earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University. Born in New York, he immigrated to Israel in his teens.
Sam Lehman-Wilzig
Brown University
Professor Lehman-Wilzig is the Chairman of the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University and an Adjunct Professor of Communication at Netanya College. His areas of expertise include: new media (internet, wireless telephony, digital communications) and its evolutionary development and influence on society and politics; Israeli politics – especially political communication, public protest and alternative socio-economic systems; and information, society, and politics – prediction, planning and public policy. Dr. Lehman-Wilzig received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Yoram Peri
American University
Professor Yoram Peri is the Head of the Rothschild Caesarea School of Communication. He is also the head of the Chaim Herzog Institute for Media, Politics, and Society and professor of Political Sociology and Communication in the Department of Communication at Tel Aviv University. He is a former political advisor to the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and former Editor-in-Chief of the Israeli daily, Davar. Professor Peri has published extensively on Israeli society, media and politics. Among his publications are: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Between Battles, Ballots: Israel Military in Politics, Telepopulism: Media and Politics in Israel, and Brothers at War: Rabin's Assassination and the Cultural war in Israel. His most recent book is Generals in the Cabinet Room: How the Military Shapes Israeli Policy.
Arie Perliger
State University of New York, Stony Brook
Professor Perliger is the Lady David Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Hebrew University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Haifa and focuses his research and teaching on terrorism and political violence, Middle East politics, the radical right in Europe and Israel, political socialization, and international security. His books include: Middle Eastern Terrorism and Countering Terrorism in Urban Environment – The Case of Jerusalem.
Traveling Scholars in the Midwest
Alexander Bligh
Notre Dame University
Professor Bligh is a former Advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister on Arab Affairs (1990-1992). He also served as Deputy in that office for the three years prior. He is currently the Chair of the Department of Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies at the College of Judea and Samaria and the Director of that school’s Center for International Strategic Assessment. He is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Bar-Ilan University and the Director of the Masters Program on Democracy and Democratization in the Arab World. His lecture topics include: ethnic conflicts in comparative perspective; history of Islam since the 7th century; international relations; minorities in the Middle East; political and social history of the Middle East since the 18th century; sources of radical Islam, development, and current political implications; refugees and human rights in the post-World War II world; regimes, societies, and political systems in the Middle East; religious fundamentalism and its political implications; the political development, security, and foreign policies of Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan; and the political, religious, and economic dimensions of terror.
Naomi Gale
University of Colorado-Boulder
Naomi Gale was born in Iraq, immigrated to Israel and was raised in Kiryat Malachi, a development town in the south of Israel. After completing her BA in Sociology, Anthropology, and Social work, she went on to the University of Sydney where she received her PhD in the area of immigration of Sephardim to Australia during the period of the White Australia Policy. After receiving a generous grant from the University of Sydney, she went on to Western Australia to conduct fieldwork for her postdoctoral, researching the chain emigration of the Orthodox Jews from Zfat at the turn of the 20th century. Following that, she received the Golda Meir Fellowship followed by Sir Zalman Cowen's generous scholarship which enabled her to continue her post doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Professor Gale studied law, specializing in criminal law and small claims, and she is an attorney as well as an Alternative Dispute Resolution specialist, specializing in family law. She worked as a Schusterman Visiting Professor at American University and the Washington College of Law in Washington, DC, and will be a 2008-2009 Schusterman Visiting Professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder. She lectured at several colleges under the auspices of Bar-Ilan University and was, for more that a decade, a lecturer in the Departments of Political Science and Oriental Studies at Bar-Ilan University. For several years, she acted as the coordinator of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Academic College of Ashkelon, where she has been working for eleven years as a senior lecturer. Professor Gale completed a sabbatical at the University of Cambridge, England, comparing the Israeli and the British legal systems. She has published in the area of immigration, gender and Israeli society, with two books, Violence against Women (2003) and The Sephardim of Sydney (2005), and several articles, including pieces in the Journal of Sociology, Ethnology, NEW COMMUNITY and the International Journal of Sociology of the Family.
Yitzhak Reiter
University of Minnesota
Professor Reiter earned his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University’s Department for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. He is an Associate Professor at Ashkelon Academic College and an adjunct lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem’s Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. He has served as Chief Consultant to Israel’s National Security Council on integrating Israeli Arabs into the state, and has been an advisor to Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres and Minister Ezer Weitzman. He has written about the Land of Israel and Jerusalem under Islamic rule in historic and modern times, the status of Israel’s Arab minority, and the religious aspects of the Israeli-Arab issues.
Elisheva Rosman
University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Rosman is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Bar-Ilan University and the Ashkelon Academic College. She has written on topics that include religious Zionism and military service; Qatar and democracy; the Gulf States and Israel; the Gaza disengagement; the mediation program of the garin in women’s midrashot; and the relevance of the OSCE’s security model for Mediterranean states. Her main research and teaching areas are Israel Studies, religious Zionism, civil society, religion and the military, the Gulf States and Israel, and the foreign policy of weak states.
Maurice Roumani
University of Oklahoma
Professor Maurice M. Roumani, born in Benghazi, Libya, is a Senior Lecturer in Political Sociology and the Middle East and founder and director of the J.R. Elyachar Center for the Study of Sephardi Heritage at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. A graduate of Brandeis University, the University of Chicago and the University of London, he has held teaching and research positions at the Hebrew University, Bar-Ilan University, George Washington University, the University of Maryland, Harvard University and the University of Rome. His fields of interest are international relations, minorities, Middle East and North African politics, and Islam and Judaism. He is the author of many articles and books, including From Immigrant to Citizen: The Contribution of the Army to National Integration; The Jews from Arab countries: A Neglected Issue; and Ethnicity, Integration and the Military (edited with Henry Dietz and Jerrold Elkin). His forthcoming book deals with the history of Libyan Jewry between 1938 and their final exodus in 1967. He serves on the international board of Religioni e Societa, a quarterly of social sciences of religion published in Italy.
Miri Talmon-Bohm
University of Wisconsin
Dr. Talmon-Bohm has been teaching about Israeli culture and identity through film and television for more than 20 years. She specializes in cultural studies with a focus on Israeli culture, including cinema, literature, folk/popular culture, and media in Israel. Her academic background in applied linguistics includes foreign language teaching expertise (specifically, Hebrew for speakers of English and English for speakers of Hebrew). Themes of courses previously and currently taught include the politics of identity in Israeli culture; the negotiation of collective and national Israeli identity in cinema and television; popular/folk Israeli culture: Jewish origins, Israeli variations; the impact of the Israeli context on Israeli society and culture as an immigrant society; being in a state of conflict, terror and war: changing trends in culture (cultural history); the impact of the Holocaust on Israeli consciousness; the conflict and terror in Israeli life; the Israeli media and its products (especially popular Israeli culture) as cultural reflections – in both American and Israeli contexts; impact of postmodernism and globalization on Israeli culture, especially as articulated in cinema and television.
Traveling Scholars on the West Coast
Shlomo Aronson
University of Arizona
Professor Shlomo Aronson is a historian and political scientist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. A former television executive and correspondent for the Israeli radio and television system in Germany and Brussels, Belgium, he dedicated decades of research into the origins of the "Final Solution"; the background and career of the major perpetrators, rescue dilemmas and efforts during the Holocaust; and the impact of the Holocaust on Israel's society and behavior. He then studied Israel's domestic politics and security dilemmas, as well as U.S.-Israeli relations. Shlomo was appointed consultant to the Inter Agency Working Group, Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, at the U.S. National Archives and Record Administration in College Park, MD. Beforehand he held the 1939 Club Holocaust Chair as visiting professor at UCLA. He also served as a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, scholar in residence at the Library of Congress, and scholar in residence at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. His numerous books and articles on the Holocaust, Israeli politics, and foreign and security affairs were published by major German, American and Israeli publishers and won Israeli and international prizes.
Guy Ben-Porat
University of California at Davis
Professor Ben-Porat is a Lecturer in the Department of Public Policy and Administration at Ben-Gurion University’s School of Management and is a Research Fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. Professor Ben Porat’s research focuses on public policy in a multicultural society, globalization, Israeli politics, implementing peace agreements in Israel and Northern Ireland, the economic aspects of political and international affairs, comparative politics, secularism and liberalism in Israel’s public square, and comparative neo-Conservatism in Israel and America.
Yifat Holzman-Gazit
Stanford University
Dr. Holzman-Gazit is a senior lecturer at the College of Management, School of Law in Rishon Lezion. Dr. Holzman-Gazit has a law degree (LL.B.) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received her J.S.D from Stanford Law School. She clerked for Hon. Justice Eliezer Goldberg of the Supreme Court of Israel. Her doctoral dissertation won the Jewish National Fund's Ben-Shemesh Award for academic work in the field of land law. Dr. Holzman-Gazit has published extensively on the history of Israel's land expropriation laws and on the legal status of the Jewish National Fund. Her book, Land Expropriation in Israel: Law, Culture and Society, was published in 2007. Dr. Holzman-Gazit teaches classes at Stanford on Minority Rights in Israel and History of the Arab-Israeli Land Conflict.
The scholars' bios are also available for downloading here: 
Traveling Israel Scholars (PDF file 110Kb)
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