KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Dr Daniel Gordis
Daniel Gordis is Senior Vice President of the Shalem Center, where he is also a senior fellow.
The author of numerous books on Jewish thought and currents in Israel, Dr. Gordis was the founding dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism, the first rabbinical college on the West Coast of the United States. Dr. Gordis joined Shalem in 2007 to help found Israel’s first liberal arts college, after spending nine years as vice president of the Mandel Foundation in Israel and director of its Leadership Institute. Since moving to Israel in 1998, Dr. Gordis has written and lectured throughout the world on Israeli society and the challenges facing the Jewish state. His writing has appeared in magazines and newspapers including The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, Moment, Tikkun, and Conservative Judaism. His latest book, Saving Israel: How the Jewish State Can Win a War That May Never End was published by Wiley in March 2009. Dr. Gordis has a doctorate from the University of Southern California.
Professor Samuel Heilman
Samuel Heilman holds the Harold Proshansky Chair in Jewish Studies at the CUNY Graduate Centre of Queens College of the City University of New York, where he serves as a Distinguished Professor of Sociology. He has been a visiting professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and a Fulbright visiting professor at the University of Nanjing in China. He is the author of numerous articles and reviews as well as ten books: Synagogue Life, The People of the Book, The Gate Behind the Wall, A Walker in Jerusalem, Cosmopolitans and Parochials: Modern Orthodox Jews in America (co-authored with Steven M. Cohen), Defenders of the Faith: Ultra-Orthodox Jewry, Portrait of American Jews: The Last Half of the 20th Century, When a Jew Dies: The Ethnography of a Bereaved Son, Sliding to the Right: The Contest for the Future of American Jewish Orthodoxy, and The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson (co-authored with Menachem Friedman). Heilman is also a frequent contributor to a number of magazines and newspapers.
Professor Bethamie Horowitz
Bethamie Horowitz is a socio-psychologist with 25 years of experience developing usable knowledge to address major issues facing the Jewish world. She served as Director of Planning and Research at UJA-Federation of New York in the 1990s. She conducted the 1991 NY Jewish Population Study, and subsequently developed the groundbreaking Connections and Journeys Study, documenting patterns of Jewish engagement among baby boomer and younger American Jews. From 2000 to 2007 she directed research for the Mandel Foundation Israel.
An astute observer of the American Jewry, from 2004-2007 she wrote a monthly column in The Forward about emerging sociological developments relevant to the Jewish community.
She is a Research Asst. Professor in NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, where she teaches the core doctoral seminar in the Education and Jewish Studies.
She began her research career more than 25 years ago focusing on conflict resolution and images of war and peace in the Middle East, and in 1988 she conducted nightly polling of the Israeli electorate as part of the Labour Party’s research team.
She received her A.B. from Harvard University in anthropology and her Ph.D. from The CUNY Graduate Center in socio-psychology.
Professor Andrew Markus
Andrew Markus holds the Pratt Foundation Research Chair of Jewish Civilisation at Monash University and is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. He is former head of Monash University's Department of History, served as elected staff representative on the Council of Monash University and was Director of the university's Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation from 2001 to 2006.
Andrew has published extensively on Australian immigration and race relations. His publications include Australian Race Relations 1788-1993 (1994), Race: John Howard and the Remaking of Australia (2001), and the co-authored The 1967 Referendum (1997, 2007), The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights (1999, 2000), Building a New Community: Immigration and the Victorian Economy (2001), Australia's Immigration Revolution (2009) and Immigration and Nation Building: Australia and Israel Compared (2010).
Andrew is the principal researcher on the Australian Jewish population study, heads the Scanlon Foundation Mapping Social Cohesion national survey program and is the author of the reports of survey findings (2007, 2009, 2010, 2011). Over the last year he worked with colleagues to develop two internet sites, one dealing with contemporary immigration issues, Mapping Australia's Population (www.arts.monash.edu.au/mapping-population/), and the second with the history of Yiddish speaking immigrants who settled in Melbourne (www.arts.monash.edu.au/yiddish-melbourne/).
Moshe Semyonov
Moshe Semyonov is the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Chair Professor in Sociology of Labor at Tel Aviv University and the current President of the Israeli Sociological Society. He is also Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests lie in the areas of comparative stratification and inequality, and in the study of global migration and the status of immigrants in host societies. Professor Semyonov serves on editorial boards of sociological journals and on academic committees and boards of public and academic institutions. Throughout the years he has received research grants, awards and fellowships. He co-authored and edited several books and published a large number of research articles in sociological journals.
Professor David Shneer
David Shneer is the Louis Singer chair of Jewish history and directs the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Called a "taboo-breaking scholar" by Tikkun magazine, Dr. Shneer's books include Queer Jews, finalist for the Lambda Literary award, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora, that sparked discussion in publications like the Economist and the Jerusalem Post, and is used in university classrooms around the world that are exploring contemporary Jewish identity and Israel-Diaspora relationships. His newest book, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, & the Holocaust, looks at the lives and works of two dozen World War II military photographers to examine what kinds of photographs they took when they encountered evidence of Nazi genocide on the Eastern Front. He serves as consultant to numerous Jewish agencies on questions of contemporary Jewish identity, with a particular focus on the contemporary Russian Jewish diaspora and how their settlement is or should be transforming Jewish communities.