Research Associates

Dr. Sarai Aharoni

a feminist scholar and lecturer in the Gender Studies program at Ben Gurion University in the Negev. She is a co-founder of the Haifa Feminist Research Center and an active member of “Isha L’Isha – Haifa Feminist Center.” Her 2009 PhD dissertation at Bar Ilan University addressed gender aspects and the integration of Israeli women in the peace negotiations between Israel and the PLO in the 1990s. Aharoni was a post-doctoral fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute at the Hebrew University and at the University of Haifa, as well as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her main research areas are the U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325, gender and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, wartime rape, feminist theories of security and international relations, and the history of feminism and the promotion of women’s rights in Israel. Together with Dr. Yael Hasson, she created “Ma’arag” [The Israel Women’s Policy Agencies (WPA-IL)], a database that includes information of all the organizations and institutions promoting women’s rights, feminism, and gender equality in Israel, which were established between 1970 and 2018. The database was developed in an attempt to promote feminist approaches for data collection and database development. Aharoni is also a member of a research group that focuses on feminist archives as a source of knowledge about violence, with Ruth Preser, Hedva Eyal, Yael Afriat and Ayala Olier.

Email Address: sarai.aharoni@gmail.com
Personal Website: https://bit.ly/2S89cqQ

Dr. Hedva Eyal

פרופיל

is a feminist scholar. She received her PhD from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her dissertation addressed the regulation of medical experiments in humans in Israel. An active member at “Isha L’Isha – Haifa Feminist Center,” Eyal co-founded and coordinated the Women and Medical Technologies project. She is a member of Bnei Zion hospital’s ethics committee and “The Gun on the Kitchen Table” project. Her main research areas are the links between science, medicine and state, gender and fertility technologies, the Depo Provera contraceptive prescription policy among women of the Ethiopian community in Israel, and the humanitarian aid to the wounded Syrian civilians in Israel.

Email Address: ehedva@gmail.com

Dr. Noga Efrati

is a historian of the Middle East and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic Studies at the Open University. She is a member of the organizing committee of the Women Historians’ Forum of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Her research focuses on women and gender In the Arab world and on the social and political history of modern Iraq. Between 2006 and 2011 she led the Post-Saddam Iraq Research Group at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Women in Iraq: Past Meets Present (Columbia University Press, 2012), co- editor with Prof. Ruth Roded of Women and Gender in the Middle East (Hebrew), and co-editor with Amnon Cohen of Post-Saddam Iraq: New Realities, Old Identities, Changing Patterns. Her essays were published in IJMES, MEJ, and the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, among others.

Dr. Noa Balf

is a scholar of gender and politics. Her research focused on the role of seniority and authority in the legislature on gender-related policy outcomes in Israel and Argentina. She has published work on gender, security and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has contributed policy and opinion pieces on gender, women, parties and state institutions in Israel for the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC and the Israeli newspaper Globs. Her latest essay explores the vast gaps between Jewish Americans and Israeli Jews, and their effects on the Jewish community’s policy towards Israel. She was a lecturer at the University of Maryland, College Park in the Department of Government and Politics.

Email Address: noa.balf@gmail.com

Dr. Na'ama Ben Ze'ev

פרופיל

is a social historian who studies the Palestinian society in the 20th century. She wrote her PhD dissertation on Palestinian rural migrants in the city of Haifa under the British Mandate (Ben Gurion University, 2010). Between 2004 and 2006 she edited the interdisciplinary journal of Middle East studies Jama’a. In 2015, together with Dr. Anat Kidron, she led the research group “Constructing and Transcending Community Boundaries in Palestine of the 19th and 20th centuries” at the Schumacher Institute, the University of Haifa. She is currently writing (with Dr. Gal Amir) about Palestinian lawyers in the state of Israel in the 1950s and 1960s. Ben Ze’ev is a Research Associate at the University of Haifa, a lecturer at the Tel Hai College, and a member of the Women Historians’ Forum at “Isha L’Isha”‘s Feminist Research Center.

Dr. Gal Amir

is studying the legal history of regime transitions in Israel/Palestine in the 20th century. The main focus of his research, his thesis and doctoral dissertations, is the millet system – an Ottoman legal arrangement that gave jurisdiction to religious courts of different religious communities in regards to personal status matters.  He has also published several essays in collaboration with Professor Shulamit Almog on legal feminism, including a philosophical and legal analysis of the #MeToo phenomenon. He is currently writing a joint monography with Dr. Na’ama Ben Ze’ev on Palestinian lawyers in the State of Israel in the 1950s and 1960s. Amir is a research fellow at the Faculty of Law and the Jewish-Arab Center at the University of Haifa, and a member of the Women Historians’ Forum at “Isha L’Isha”‘s Feminist Research Center.

Email Address: agal39@yahoo.com

Dr. Ebtesam Barakat

is a feminist scholar and lecturer at the Zefat Academic College and the Gender Studies Program at Bar Ilan University. She wrote her doctoral dissertation, “Strategies and Practices of Resistance of Druze Women Against Multiple Power Relations,” at Bar Ilan University. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Minerva Center for Human Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Gender Studies department and the Ben Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism at Ben Gurion University. She is currently involved in a study of the challenges faced by ultra-religious Jewish and Palestinian women in the Israeli workforce. Her main research areas are gender and religion, and women in the Israeli workforce.

Email Address: ebtesam1970@gmail.com

Dr. Edna Gorney

was born in Tel Aviv. She holds a PhD in Behavioral Ecology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MA in Creative Writing in the Department of Hebrew & Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. She has been a lecturer in the Master’s Program in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Haifa and in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Yezreel Valley College. Her book Exploited and Protected: Ecofeminist Theory of Nature, Culture and Society in Israel (Hebrew) was published by Pardes Publishing in 2011. Her poetry book Lift and Drag (Hebrew) was published by Olam Hadash in December 2014. In 2020 she published Zoological Portrait: A Lexicon (Pardes Publishing, Hebrew), and Things I Found in the Family Storage (Achuzat Bayit Books, Hebrew). Gorney is a volunteer at “Isha L’Isha,” a member of the negotiation team for improving the employment conditions of the junior staff at the Yezreel Valley College. She is also a member of the negotiation team working to reach a collective agreement for public colleges teachers. Her research areas are ecofeminism, environmental justice, and ecocriticism.

Email Address:  ednagorney@yahoo.com

Dr. Tal Dekel

is a researcher of art and society. Her work focuses on the issues of visual culture and women’s lives, analyzing the interrelations between different aspects of identity, such as gender, ethnicity, class, nationality, and religion and age. Her fields of expertise are immigration and transnationality reflected in the art of women in Israel, and representations of gender and old age. In 2011 she published her book Gendered: Art and Feminist Theory (Kibbutz Meuchad Press, Hebrew), which was published in English by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2013. Her second book, Women and Migration: Art and Gender in a Transnational Age (Resling Books, 2013, Hebrew), was published in English by Wayne State University Press in 2016. In 2020 she published her third book, Women and Ageism: Gender and Art in Israel with The Open University Press (Hebrew).

Email Address: tdekel@tauex.tau.ac.il
Personal Website: https://www.taldekel.net/

Dr. Gilly Hartal

is a lecturer in the Gender Studies Program at Bar Ilan University. Her research focuses on cultural and political geographies of sexualities. Her doctoral dissertation examined LGBT politics in four activist spaces in Israel.

Her post-doctoral project, conducted at McGill University, Canada, explored the political economy of gay tourism to Tel Aviv. The study focused on the ways in which global discourse, political and financial power relations and homonational processes are at play in the urban space. Currently, Hartal is working on a new project on the political subjectivity of non-heterosexual (lesbian, bisexual, and transgender) women in the Israeli peripheries. Her study is supported by the Israeli Science Foundation.

Together with Dr. Adi Moreno, Hartal founded the LGBT/queer research community at the Israeli Sociological Society, which serves as an academic home for research on sexuality in the humanities and social sciences. Her main research areas are power and politics of space, politics of belonging, queer geography, queer protest and urban social movements, constructions of safe spaces, queer theory and politics, and ethnography (qualitative methodology).

Dr. Yali Hashash

is a social historian. His research focuses on the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish communities in Israel and the Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular focus on the broad margins of these communities – women and the poor. Hashash received her PhD  from the University of Haifa in 2011. Her doctoral dissertation was titled “Changing attitudes towards poverty in the Sephardic community in Jerusalem 1841-1880.” Her work combines Mizrachi Studies approaches, post-colonial theory, feminist theory, and socioeconomic analysis.

Hashash is a feminist activist at “Isha L’Isha” where she co-founded the Women and Medical Technologies project and the Oral History Lab. She is Head of the Gender Studies Department at Biet Berl Academic College and a lecturer at the Tel Aviv University and the Tel Hai College. Among her recent publications: “We Are All Jews: On ‘White Trash,’ Mizrachi Jews and Multiple Marginalities within the Hegemony” (Theory and Criticism Journal, Hebrew) and “Gender, Religion, and Secularism in the English Mission Hospital of Jerusalem, 1844–1880” (Journal of Levantine Studies).

Dr. Inbal Wilamovski

is a feminist scholar and a teaching fellow at the Institute of Criminology and the Lafer Center for Women and Gender Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Gender Studies Program at the Tel Aviv University, and Sapir Academic College. Wilamovski wrote her doctoral dissertation, Dating Violence in Israel: A Feminist Perspective, at the Institute of Criminology, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her post-doctoral research focused on street harassments. Her current interests include gender aspects of the body and space in the fields of delinquency, victimhood, and law enforcement. She is active in the field of violence against women in various arenas. She also studies, dances, and teaches oriental dance

Email Address: inbiloo@gmail.com

Dr. Yael Hasson

is a sociologist. Her doctoral dissertation, written in the Department of Sociology at the University of Haifa, examined Israeli economics and its gendered aspects, from the perspective of women economists. Since 2004, Hasson has been a researcher and lecturer at the Adva Centre, a research institute that monitors social and economic developments and analyzes public policy against standards of equality and social justice. In this framework, she is developing knowledge and practices of gender mainstreaming in socioeconomic policy and in national and municipal budgets (gender budgeting) in Israel. Between 2018 and 2020 she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Ben Gurion University, and together with Sr. Sarai Aharoni, she founded “”Ma’arag” [The Israel Women’s Policy Agencies (WPA-IL)], a database that includes information of all the organizations and institutions promoting women’s rights, feminism, and gender equality in Israel, which were established between 1970 and 2018. Her fields of expertise are gender sociology, women in economics, feminist economics, women in the workforce and inequality.

Email Address: yaelhasson77@gmail.com

Dr. Nicole Khayat

is a historian of the modern Middle East. She is a member of the organizing committee of the Women Historians’ Forum of the 19th and 20th centuries. She completed her doctoral dissertation, Historiography and Translation during the Arabic Nahḍa: European History in Arabic, at the University of Haifa in 2017. She is a teaching fellow at the Hebrew University, where she gives a course on the Arab Nahda in the 19th century in the Rothberg International School’s department of Graduate Programs. She created an archive based on photographs of Palestinian life in Haifa prior to 1948, and co-organized an exhibition at the Haifa City Museum which presented portions of the archives. Her areas of interest include intellectual and cultural history of the Arabic-speaking world, and the modern Arab theater. Currently, her research focuses on physicians and medicine in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century as part of a post-doctorate fellowship at the Hebrew University project “A Regional History of Medicine in the Middle East.”

Dr Adi Moreno

holds a Master’s degree in Sociology and Anthropology from Tel Aviv University and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester University. Her doctoral dissertation examines parenting through surrogacy among gay men in Israel. Her research areas include queer theory, sociology of science and Actor-Network-Theory, fertility technologies, and changes in family structures in contemporary society. She is currently involved in advising graduate students and mentoring academic writing.

Ayelet Maoz

is a political anthropologist who is currently completing her doctoral dissertation, Arrested Freedom: Policing and Politics on Jamaica’s Global Plantation, at the University of Chicago. The first part of the dissertation examines how slavery has shaped the forms of social management and control in the area, and how they are being reconstituted by global reform projects. The study suggests that reform and policing should be examined in a shared analytical framework, as two facets of capitalistic innovation and institutionalization. The second part of the thesis deals with the paradoxes of liberation and the collapse of the political horizon in the neo-liberal era, and the transformation of social management into a dominant paradigm. In this section, the ethnographic research focuses on a series of historical, transient and tense moments, during which the boundaries of collective imagination and action were revealed and stretched.

Maoz’a research focuses on the intersection of violence and political economy, with an emphasis on the relevance of colonial institutions for understanding contemporary financial capitalism. Her Master’s thesis, which she completed in the Department of Sociology at Tel Aviv University, served as the basis for her book “A Living Law: Police and Sovereignty in an Occupation Regime (published by the Van Leer Institute Press and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2020). The book focuses on the frontier as a paradigmatic site for understanding the forms of violence performed by the state and its neoliberal agents.

Maoz, a left-wing feminist activist, co-organized the Women’s Coalition for Peace between 2008 and 2011. She is committed to teaching and liberating pedagogy and has taught courses in social theory, critical theories of police and security, and feminist theories of power in Chicago and Kingston.

Email Address: maoz@uchicago.edu

Dr. Sharon Maftsir

is a sociocultural historian of the Middle East. Her research focuses on gender identity and performance in modern Egyptian society. Her main interests are questions regarding the relationship between structural social changes and the daily culture and experience of emotions, sexuality, and the family. Maftsir teaches in the graduate program of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Haifa. She is a member of the organizing committee of the Women Historians’ Forum of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her essay “Emotional Change: Romantic Love and the University in Post-Colonial Egypt” is about to be published in the Journal of Social History.

Email Address: Sharonmaf@gmail.com

Dr. Hannah Safran

is an activist and volunteer at “Isha L’Isha” and a co-founder of the Haifa Feminist Research Center..  Her 2006 book Don’t Wanna Be Nice Girls: The Struggle for Suffrage and the New Feminism in Israel  (Hebrew), published by Pardes Publishing, explores the history of feminist activism in Israel. Safran is a lecturer and researcher in the fields of women’s studies, feminism, and gender. Her latest research deals with the history of feminist-lesbian activism in Israel and the history of the women’s peace movement (together with her partner Dr. Dalia Sachs).

Email Address: hsafran10@hotmail.com

Dr. Ruth Preser

is a lecturer at Tel Hai College, member of ‘Isha L’Isha’ and co-founder of the Haifa Feminist Research Center. A gender studies scholar by training and a cultural researcher in practice, her work focuses on citizenship, belonging and the public sphere in Israeli society. Her doctoral dissertation offered a queer perspective on kinship (Bar Ilan University, 2012). In her postdoctoral research, she focused on the intersection between migration and sexuality in the European cosmopolitan city (ICI Berlin – Institute for Culture Inquiry, 2014 and Humboldt University, Berlin, 2013). Her study of women without status in Haifa and northern Israel is currently being published within the framework of “Isha L’Isha”‘s project on the issue. Preser is also a member of a research group dealing with feminist archives as a source of knowledge about violence, with Dr. Sarai Aharoni, Dr. Hedva Eyal, Yael Afriat, and Ayala Olier.

Prof. Liat Kozma

פרופיל

is a faculty member in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her PhD from the joint program in history and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University.  She is the current director of the Center for Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University, the co-editor (with On Barak and Avner Wishnitzer) of the blog “Social History Workshop” on Haaretz website, and a member of the organizing committee of the Women Historians’ Forum.

Kozma is the author of Women Writing History: Feminism and Social Change in Morocco (The Dayan Center, 2003), Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law and Medicine in Egypt 1850-1882 (Syracuse University Press, 2011), and Global Women, Colonial Ports: Regulated Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East (SUNY press, 2017). She was the editor of several publications, including Facing the Shar‘ia Court: Transformations in the Status of Muslim Women in Israel and the Middle East (Ressling, 2011, Hebrew), and the co-editor, with Heba Yazbak, of Personal Status and Gender: Muslim Women in Israel (Pardes, 2017, Hebrew). Her articles examine Moroccan feminism, sexology in translation in the modern Middle East, the history of drug trafficking in Egypt and beyond, and the history of medical research in the region

As of September 2017, Kozma will be leading a research project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), titled:”A Regional History of Medicine in the Middle East, 1830-1960.”

Dr. Yael Rozin

is studying the visual and cultural representations of the LGBTQ community in Israel. She was the founder and coordinator of the visual archives which are part of the feminist and lesbian archives of “Isha L’Isha”. She is a lecturer at the Department of Management and Economics at the Open University of Israel, and teaches queer art and theory in the Master’s Program for in Policy and Theory of the Arts at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. She is the project entrepreneur of ARTiq – Queer Art in Israel, an initiative that promotes queer art and supports queer artists of every gender and artistic discipline.

Email Address: yaelrozin@gmail.com