What defines Israel Studies as an academic discipline today, and where might the field be heading in view of the profound changes shaping Israel, diaspora Jewry, and Israel's international standing? How has the aftermath of October 7 impacted academic research and university teaching about modern Israel in American academia? Join Amichai Magen and Ori Rabinowitz in conversation with Professor Donna Robinson Divine, former President of the Association for Israel Studies (2017-2019), and Dr. Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Donna Robinson Divine is the Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Government, Emerita at Smith College, where she taught a variety of courses on Middle East Politics. Her writing includes Women Living Change:  Cross-Cultural Perspectives; essays from the Smith College Research Project on Women and Social Change; Politics and Society in Ottoman Palestine: The Arab Struggle for Survival and Power; Postcolonial Theory and The Arab-Israeli Conflict; Exiled in the Homeland: Zionism and the Return to Mandate Palestine; Word Crimes: Reclaiming the Language of the Israel-Palestinian Conflict; and October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds. Named the Katharine Asher Engel lecturer at Smith College for the 2012-2013 academic year in recognition of her scholarly achievements, she was also designated as Smith's Honored Professor for the excellence of her teaching. She was president of the Association for Israel Studies from 2017-2019, is an affiliate professor at Israel's University of Haifa, and was named to Algemeiner’s 2019 list of the top 100 people “positively influencing Jewish life."

Asaf Romirowsky, PhD, is the Executive Director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). Romirowsky is also a senior nonresident research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA)  and a Professor [Affiliate] at the University of Haifa. Trained as a Middle East historian, he holds a PhD in Middle East and Mediterranean Studies from King's College London, UK, and has published widely on various aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict and American foreign policy in the Middle East, as well as on Israeli and Zionist history. Romirowsky is co-author of Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief and a contributor to The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel. His latest book is entitled, October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds. Romirowsky’s publicly-engaged scholarship has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The National Interest, The American Interest, The New Republic, The Times of Israel, Jerusalem Post, Ynet, and Tablet, among other online and print media outlets.

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Contrary to expectations following the end of the Cold War, several autocracies have modernized without succumbing to democratizing pressures. This paper argues that a non-trivial number of 21st-century autocrats generate reputations for economic delivery via large-scale infrastructure due to its observability, tangibility, and durability as an asset, providing rulers with a credible commitment device for continued development while retaining authoritarian political institutions. I evaluate a central implication of this argument using geolocated data on 150,000 large-scale construction projects since 2005 and micro-level attitudes from nine harmonized survey datasets, covering 2.5 million respondents across 2,300 subnational districts. Exploiting within-district variation, I find that effective project delivery increases perceived government performance, with effects concentrated among established autocracies and democratic backsliders.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Chris Dann is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Stanford University and is a current pre-doctoral fellow with the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Before graduate school he received a BSc from the London School of Economics and an MSc at the University of Oxford. He then returned to LSE for two years as a pre-doctoral fellow, working for economist Professor Sir Tim Besley. His research interests lie in the political economy of large-scale infrastructure investments and how these shape the social contract. 

Six days before Israelis head to the polls—for what is perhaps the most dramatic and consequential national election in the country's history—what do the latest public opinion surveys tell us about the contending parties and possible outcomes of the elections? Is the Netanyahu bloc likely to win or lose the elections, or are we heading towards a possible stalemate or some new political constellation in Israel? Join Amichai Magen and Ori Rabinowitz for a conversation about the upcoming elections with expert public opinion researcher and political strategist Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin is a political strategist and public opinion researcher who has advised on nine electoral campaigns in Israel and worked in 15 other countries over 25 years. She is a columnist at Haaretz newspaper and a policy fellow at Century International. Dahlia conducts public opinion research for civil society organizations, including joint Israeli-Palestinian surveys. She holds a PhD in political science from Tel Aviv University, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, among other publications. She is the author of The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel: Promise Unfulfilled (2023), and in 2025, she was a Distinguished Middle East fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Virtual Event Only.

Three years after the October 7, 2023, invasion and massacre, the questions and consequences surrounding the worst security failure in Israel's modern history continue to reverberate. With no National Commission of Inquiry established by the Netanyahu government to investigate how Israel was caught off-guard and no definite end to the multi-front war that followed the Hamas attack (in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen), how can we make sense of October 7 and its aftermath? Join Amichai Magen and Or Rabinowitz in conversation with Amos Harel as, three years on, they seek to understand the causes and consequences of the day that forever changed Israel, the Middle East, and the world.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Amos Harel is one of Israel's most accomplished and respected journalists and authors in military and defense affairs. As the military correspondent and then senior defense analyst for Haaretz for nearly three decades, Harel has covered Israeli security and published four books including, most recently, 06:29 - Anatomy of a Failure (published in Hebrew in May 2026), which examines the intelligence misses, military responses, and political context surrounding the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks. Previously, he coauthored, with journalist and screenwriter Avi Issacharoff, The Seventh War (2004), about the second Intifada, and 34 Days (2008), about Israel's second Lebanon War. Both books received the Chechic Award, given annually by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel-Aviv. Harel's The New Face of the IDF, was published in Hebrew in 2013. In 2015, Amos Harel won the Sokolov Award, Israel's most prestigious prize for excellence in journalism.

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Israel's Declaration of Independence is its most important political text. It is, in fact, the only official text from Israel's founding moment that speaks to foundational subjects of statecraft: the nature of sovereignty, the relationship between religion and state, and the rights of citizens. This presentation will explore the history of drafting Israel's Declaration of Independence and the sometimes-clashing efforts of its multiple drafters to define Israel's character in 1948. It will pay special attention to the contribution of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who fundamentally transformed the proposed text of Israel's Declaration, producing a quite different final version in the days before May 14, 1948. Finally, it will consider whether Israel's Declaration of Independence might serve as a text of "civil religion" for Israel today.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Neil Rogachevsky is Assistant Professor in the Hamilton School, having previously taught at Yeshiva University. His research concerns Israeli political thought and history, comparative constitutionalism, and Jewish history.

With Dov Zigler, Rogachevsky is the co-author of Israel’s Declaration of Independence: The History and Political Theory of the Nation’s Founding Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2023), which won that year’s Concordia-Azrieli prize for Best Book in Israel Studies. He is currently at work on a new book on the political thought of David Ben-Gurion, which is slated to appear with Cambridge University Press in 2027.

Rogachevsky’s scholarship has also appeared or is forthcoming in Israel Studies Review, Shofar, The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, French History, and edited volumes on Michel Houellebecq’s political thought from Brill and diaspora politics in the United States from NYU Press. Rogachevsky also writes widely for general-interest and policy journals including the Wall Street Journal, Mosaic, Jewish Review of Books, The National Interest, The Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, First Things, and American Affairs.

Protest and Politics in Turkey in the 1970s: Echoes of Dissent offers the first comprehensive academic study of Turkey’s protest cycle during the 1970s. Drawing on an original dataset, the book examines the interaction between collective action and state repression, tracing the development of leftist, nationalist, and Islamist movements throughout the decade. The book also analyzes how the 1980 military coup suppressed organized political activity and reshaped the political arena, contributing to the subsequent rise of political Islam and the country’s broader rightward shift. By connecting the political struggles of the 1970s to contemporary debates over authoritarianism, democracy, and protest, the study contributes to scholarship on social movements, repression, and political change.

This event is co-sponsored by CDDRL's Program on Turkey and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

On October 27, 2026, Israelis will vote in national elections widely seen as perhaps the most consequential in the country's modern history. Why do Israelis view the 2026 elections in such dramatic, even existential, terms? Who are the main contenders and what are the main issues on which Israel will vote in the first national elections since the October 7, 2023 attack and subsequent wars? And what are the possible scenarios for the outcome of the elections? Join Amichai Magen and Masua Sagiv in conversation about these questions.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Dr. Masua Sagiv is a Senior Faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute and the academic advisor of its Center for Shared Society, as well as a senior fellow at the Helen Diller Institute, U.C. Berkeley. Masua’s work addresses the fundamental challenges facing both Israeli society and North American Jewish communities, from rising antisemitism and campus tensions to Jewish peoplehood and the complex relationship between Israel and world Jewry. Masua’s scholarly work focuses on the development of contemporary Judaism in Israel, as a culture, religion, nationality, and as part of Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state. Her research explores the role of law, state actors, and civil society organizations in promoting social change across diverse issues: shared society, religion and gender, religion and state, and Jewish peoplehood.

Masua recently returned to Israel after four years in Berkeley, California, where she was a senior faculty member for the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor at the Helen Diller Institute at UC Berkeley. Prior to her tenure in the Bay Area, Masua was the Academic Director of the Menomadin Center for Jewish and Democratic Law at Bar-Ilan University and taught at the Schools of Law at Bar-Ilan University and Tel-Aviv University. She co-led a leadership program for high-school students, for which she received the Israeli Hope in Academia Prize from former Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, and was awarded the Gorney Prize for Young Scholar in Public Law. Her book, Radical Conservativism (in Hebrew), on the Halachic Feminist struggle in Israel, was published by Carmel Publishing House in 2024.