I am the Max Kampelman Chair in Democracy and Human Rights and a professor in the Departments of Political Science and International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
I am a political scientist working on comparative politics, international relations and conflict processes, with a particular focus on ethnically divided societies and political violence. My research asks both what causes violence and what it leaves behind — including the everyday experience of people who live in protracted conflict, especially in contested cities such as Jerusalem. Across these projects I try to connect the micro level of perception, identity and choice with the macro level of institutions, territory and urban order.
I have led and collaborated on interdisciplinary research projects funded by the European Union, the Israel Science Foundation and other agencies, working with political scientists, urban scholars and public opinion researchers. That work has shaped my thinking on urban segregation, social cohesion, and the long political afterlife of displacement and historical violence.
My recent studies deal with the geography and timing of violent events in Jerusalem, attitudes toward reconciliation among conflict-exposed populations, the political incorporation of asylum seekers, and the legacy of the 1948–49 war for Israeli and Palestinian political behaviour.
I teach courses on political violence, ethnic conflict and urban politics, and I supervise graduate students; several dissertations I co-supervised have won national awards.
Background
I was born in Buenos Aires in 1966. My father, Shmuel, worked in the textile trade; my mother, Aida, was a physiotherapist. Both were born in Buenos Aires and were active in Maccabi Argentina, and their own parents had arrived there from Poland and Lithuania in the 1920s and 1930s. I went to the Sholem Aleichem kindergarten in the city.
In 1972 my parents, my brother Gabi and I immigrated to Israel. We lived first in an absorption centre in Lod, and then moved to Bat Yam, where I attended the Herzl elementary school and the Shazar high school. Politics interested me early; I was active in the Ratz party from a young age.
I studied political science and international relations at Tel Aviv University, taking courses in Jewish history and in film along the way — both subjects I had considered studying instead. In my final undergraduate semester, in 1991, I began working as a parliamentary aide in the Knesset. I later became spokesperson for the Ratz faction, one of the spokespeople for Meretz after the merger, and then spokesperson for Peace Now. In 1996 I left political work to finish my master's degree, and went on to a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.