The Murray Galinson San Diego-Israel Initiative seeks to strategically promote, support and catalyze knowledge discourse and interaction on the modern state of Israel through scholarship, engagement and collaboration.

Meet the Esteemed Israeli Professors:

Erez Ben-Yosef (Tel Aviv University) is a professor in the Department of Archaeology and the graduate program in archaeology and archaeomaterials at Tel Aviv University. He is best known for leading 21^st century digs at the ancient copper mines in Israel’s Timna Valley where he made new discoveries concerning the mystery of King Solomon’s Mines. An article on his findings was recently published in National Geographic.

UCSD Classes:

• Past, Present and Future Perspectives on Natural Resources in Israel
• Environmental Hazards in Israel
• Archaeology's Role in Building National Narrative: Israel as a Case Study

Gloria and Rodney Stone Visiting Professorship
Yehuda Goodman (Hebrew University) is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His fields of interest are psychological anthropology, medical anthropology, and anthropology of religion. His research focus is on the ways identities are formed, manufactured, and negotiated in the contexts of social and political contestations. Most recently, he has studied Jewish conversion issues among Russian and Ethiopian immigrants in Israel.

UCSD Classes:

• Special Topics in Sociocultural Anthropology: State, Nation-building, and Healthcare in Israel
• The Anthropology of Mental Health in Israel and the Diaspora
• Graduate Seminar

Luba Levin-Banchick (Bar-Ilan University) is a political scientist and historian, studying the evolution of conflict and peace in contemporary international relations of the Middle East. Her expertise is in the field of global and regional security, international crisis escalation and recurrence, domestic and transnational terrorism, cooperation and violence between rivalries, and non-state actors. In 2017, she won the Teaching with Impact Best Syllabus prize from the Israel Institute for the course she developed on “Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Israel.”

SDSU Classes:

• Arab-Israeli Relations, Past and Present
• Politics and Conflict in the Middle East 

Gilad Shtienberg (University of Haifa) studies long-term climate change in Israel and neighboring lands as a model for more general issues of global environmental change. He specializes in understanding theoretical and practical aspects of the landscape changes that occur in the dynamic environments of the coast zone. His recent projects focus on human settlement during the Biblical periods along Israel’s northern Mediterranean coast.

UCSD Classes:

• Special Topics in Anthropological Archaeology 
• Sea Level Change: The Israel Case in World Perspective 
• Coastal Geomorphology and Environmental Change     

Joseph Glickman (z"l) Visiting Professorship 
Marik Shtern, Post-Doctoral Fellow (Ben Gurion University) is a researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, where his field of research is the geography of Jewish-Arab relations in Jerusalem. He specializes in the sphere of community empowerment and strategic consulting for third sector organizations (civil society) in the fields of social and political change in Jerusalem.

UCSD Classes:

• Special Topics: Communities and Conflict in Jerusalem  
• Urban Sociology: Learning from Israeli Cities 

Ronit Weiss-Berkowitz (Tel Aviv University) teaches screenwriting at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University and is one of the founders of the Screenwriting Program at the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem. She has been a writer on several television series, directed documentaries and also served as a script editor on two series. She is well-known in Israel for the drama “A Touch Away” and the documentary, “A Place Under the Sun.” She was Editor-in-Chief at Keter Publishing House, one of the largest publishers in Israel, and has edited books by celebrated writers, including Amoz Oz, Shemi Zarhin, and Nava Semel.

SDSU Class:

• The Techniques of Screenwriting

In the 2018-2019 Academic Year, the MGSDII is proud to announce six Israeli visiting professors will teach 17 classes on modern Israel on San Diego university campuses. By bringing Israel studies to campuses, we can significantly help change the dialogue. Students emerge with more knowledge about Israel, its key successes and challenges, and its complexities. Students are empowered to think beyond slogans and sound bites to make up their own minds based on an informed view.

For more information visit leichtag.org/mgsdii/.