Joel Migdal is an emeritus faculty member and the Robert F. Philip Professor of International Studies in the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Dr. Migdal was formerly associate professor of Government at Harvard University and senior lecturer at Tel-Aviv University. His research has been on two tracks–theories of comparative politics, specifically state-society relations, and Middle East politics, with an emphasis on Israel and Palestinians. Joel has published various books and is enjoying his retirement in Eretz Israel.

Liora Halperin is Chair of the Israel Studies Program and a scholar of Jewish cultural and social history, with particular interests in nationalism and collective memory, language ideology and policy, and Jewish-Arab relations both in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and in the early years after Israeli statehood. Her first book, “Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine” (Yale University Press, 2015) was awarded the Shapiro Prize from the Association for Israel Studies for the best book in Israel Studies. She has published academic articles in The Journal of Social History, Jewish Social Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and The Jewish Quarterly Review, among other venues. She recently published “The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past” (Stanford University Press, 2021), which tells the story of Zionist settler memory in and around the private Jewish agricultural colonies (mashavot) established in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine. She received her Ph.D. in history from UCLA in 2011.

Alan Dowty is an affiliate faculty member at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, and is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. From 1963-1975, he was on the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, during which time he served as Executive Director of the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations and Chair of the Department of International Relations. From 2003-2006, he was the first holder of the Kahanoff Chair in Israeli Studies at the University of Calgary, and from 2005-2007 he was President of the Association for Israel Studies. Among his publications are basic texts on Israeli society and politics (“The Jewish State: A Century Later“) and on the Arab-Israel conflict (“Israel/Palestine,” 4th edition 2017), as well as over 130 scholarly and popular articles. In 2017 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award in Israel Studies by the Israel Institute and the Association for Israel Studies.

Hayim Katsman received his Ph.D. in international studies from the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies in 2021. He has researched the Religious-Zionist communities of Israel/Palestine extensively, and written about current trends in Religious-Zionism and its relationship to radicalism. He received his B.A. in philosophy from the Open University of Israel and completed his M.A. thesis on the theology of Rabbi Yitzchak Ginzburg at the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University, where he also served as deputy chair of the Academic Junior-Staff Union from 2015-2017. Follow him on Twitter or on Facebook.

Andrea Gevurtz Arai teaches anthropology and society courses in the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. Arai is currently researching the Israeli social movement “Standing Together” (“Omdim B’yachad”- עומדים ביחד), which advocates for equal justice for Jewish and Arab Israelis and for the reallocation of tax dollars from the military to under-funded areas of social welfare, in particular health care, education and housing. This research will be included in Arai’s in-process edited volume, “Spaces of Creative Resistance in East Asia,” which looks at the local, cross-regional and international particularities of organizations of creative resistance, which advocate for social infrastructures, imagining and creating new forms of social and environmental sustainability.

Noam Pianko is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies, the Samuel N. Stroum Chair of Jewish Studies, and Professor in the Jackson School of International Studies. Pianko also directs the Samuel and Althea Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and serves as the Herbert and Lucy Pruzan Professor of Jewish Studies. Pianko’s research interests include modern Jewish history, Zionism, and American Judaism.