Adi Ophir, director of the Lexicon for Political Theory research project at The Minerva Humanities Center, is professor at The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. Ophir’s main interest is political theory, political theology, and modern and contemporary continental philosophy with special emphasis on critical theory. In the early nineteen nineties Ophir founded and edited Theory and Criticism, the main Hebrew journal for critical theory; in 2008 he founded The lexicon Project, which later became part of the Minerva Humanities Center, together with its online peer review journal, Mafte’akh: Lexical Review for Political Thought. He wrote on twentieth-century thinkers like Arendt, Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Levinas, and Agamben, and about various aspects of Israeli politics, culture, and society. In his Order of Evils (Zone Books, 2005) he presents an outline for a “moral ontology” based on an understanding of the social production and distribution of “evils” (losses, damages, injuries, suffering, and risks), and proposes a new interpretation of the concepts of evil and injustice. Working for the Present (Avodat Hahove, Hakkibutz Hameuchad, 2001) is a collection of deconstructive readings of some major texts and events in contemporary Israeli culture. In 2002 he published with Ariella Azoulay Terrible Days (Yamim Raim, Resling), a collection of critical essays on the political situation in Israel. The One State Condition, his most recent book, co-authored with Azoulay (Resling 2008 in Hebrew; Standford 2012), is an historical survey and a comprehensive anatomy of the Israeli rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and its impact on the Israeli political system. Ophir is also the editor, together with Michal Givoni and Sari Hanafi, of The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Israeli Rule in the Occupied Territories (Zone Books, 2009), a volume dedicated to the study of various aspects, techniques, and apparatuses involved in the Israeli rule in the Occupation Territories. Ophir’s forthcoming book, Divine Violence: Two Essays on God and Disaster (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute) reconstructs different models of theocracy in the Hebrew Bible and juxtaposes the role of disaster in biblical theocracies with its role in modern state governance.
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Merav Amir is a post-doctoral fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations. She received her PhD from The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas and from The Shirley and Leslie Porter School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University. Her dissertation examines the concept of the border in the regime of movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Her publications include: “The Making of a Void Sovereignty: Political Implications of the Military Checkpoints in the West Bank”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (forthcoming 2013); “On the Border of Indeterminacy: The Separation Wall in East Jerusalem”, Geopolitics 16:4 (2011); and (with Hagar Kotef) “Between Imaginary Lines. Technologies of Power at the Israeli Checkpoints”, Theory, Culture and Society 28:1. In the lexicon project she studies the concept of security.
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Ariella Azoulay teaches visual culture and contemporary philosophy in The Program for Culture and Hermeneutics, Bar-Ilan University. She is the author of several books, including Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Resling, forthcoming; in Hebrew); Constituent Violence 1947-1950 (Resling, 2009; in Hebrew); Act of State (Etgar, 2008; in Hebrew, and published in Italian as Atto di Stato Palestina-Israele, 1967–2007: Storia Fotografica dell’Occupazione, by Bruno Mondadori, Milan, 2008), ; The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008, in English; and Resling, 2007, in Hebrew); Once upon a Time: Photography Following Walter Benjamin (Bar-Ilan University Press, 2006; in Hebrew); Death’s Showcase ( MIT Press, 2001); and (with Adi Ophir) This Regime Which is Not One: Occupation and Democracy Between the Sea and the River (Resling, 2008; in Hebrew). Azoulay is also a curator and her recent exhibitions include Constituent Violence: 1947-1950 (Zochrot Gallery, 2009) and Act of State, a photographic documentation of forty years of Israeli occupation (Minshar Gallery, 2007).
For more information look at : http://cargocollective.com/AriellaAzoulay
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Yishai Blank is a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University’s Law Faculty, where he also serves as chair of the LL.A. committee. Blank holds an LL.B. and an additional B.A. in philosophy (both cum laude) from TAU; he earned his S.J.D. at Harvard University. He researches and teaches administrative law, local government law, law and space, legal theory, and political thought. His articles on topics in these fields have appeared in leading publications in Israel and abroad. He is currently researching the legal changes taking place in global cities, and the decentralization and expansion of the role of local governments and other non-state entities with respect to church-state issues. Blank has been a visiting professor at several universities in the United States, among them Brown and Cornell. He was awarded a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation and was a member of the Young Scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences Forum of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
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Lin Chalozin-Dovrat is a Ph.D. candidate at Tel Aviv University’s School of Cultural Studies. Her dissertation analyses Time/Space relations in linguistic change and in the theoretical discourse on linguistic change, and considers the interrelations of political, social, and linguistic theories of change. Within the framework of this research, the examination of the intellectual context of theories of change demonstrates the strong ties between political theory, social sciences, and linguistics. Her research in the Lexicon will provide an analysis of the concept of crisis based on political and cognitive theories. Chalozin-Dovrat lectures at Tel Aviv University and in the Department of Film and Television at Sapir College.
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Udi Edelman is a student at The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University. His master’s thesis deals with contemporary political activism and with embarrassment and embarrassing as tactics of political action. Edelman is the co-editor of Mafte’akh – A Lexical Review of Political Thought, published by The Minerva Humanities Center. He is a curator and director of research and academic connections at the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon. His own research in the Lexicon project examines the concept-art relations.
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Ronen Eidelman is an artist, writer, and activist engaged in linking art, culture, and grassroots politics. He has participated in many exhibitions and cultural and political events worldwide, and has created numerous artistic projects in the public sphere. Eidelman was born in New York City, grew up in Jerusalem, and is now based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. He is the Co-founder and editor of Erev-Rav the leading online art and culture magazine in Hebrew and Founded and edited numerous art and social political magazines and journals such as “Maarav” (www.maarav.org.il) which he created for six years. Eidelman is a graduate of the MFA program for Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus University in Weimar; a lecturer on art and social change at Minshar Art College; and active in anti-occupation and anti-capitalist activist groups. The artistic projects he will initiate in the Lexicon group will deal with notions of security, memory, and the relations between them.
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Dani Filc was born in Argentina (1959) and finished medical school at the Buenos Aires University. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. at The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. Filc is currently a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University, a physician at Clalit Health Services, and Chairperson of Physicians for Human Right/Israel. His publications include: Populism and Hegemony in Israel (Resling, 2006; in Hebrew), Circles of Exclusion: The Politics of Care in Israel (Cornell University Press, 2009), and The political right in Israel: the many faces of Jewish populism (Routledge, 2009). His research at the lexicon group will aim at critically redefining a cluster of concepts related to the field of the political economy of the body, such as body image, brain, cosmetics, genetics, health, hospital, nutrition, organ, wellbeing, and others. Filc is married to Myri and a father of four.
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Michal Givoni completed her Ph.D. at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University in 2008. Her work deals with transnational humanitarianism, contemporary practices of witnessing, and testimony and governmentality in emergencies. Givoni was a researcher at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, where she co-directed (together with Adi Ophir and Sari Hanafi) a research project on the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories. She was one of the editors (together with Ophir and Hanafi) of a volume on the subject, entitled The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Palestinian Territories (Zone Books, 2009). Her book on contemporary ethics of testimony is forthcoming from the Van Leer Institute / Hakibutz Hame’uchad. Givoni’s research at The Minerva Humanities Center concerns ethical practices in the political sphere and focuses on a genealogical investigation of the concepts of testimony and of indifference.
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Ariel Handel studies the construction of space and its uses in relations of power and violence. His PhD dissertation, written at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Sciences and Ideas, deals with the movement regime in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and studies the movement restrictions as a distinctive technology of population management and territory appropriation.
His recent publications include:
- “Exclusionary Surveillance and Spatial Uncertainty in the Occupied Palestinian Territories”, in David Lyon, Elia Zureik and Yasmeen Abu-Laban (eds.) Surveillance in Israel/Palestine (Routledge, forthcoming).
- “Where, Whereto and When in the Occupied Territories: An Introduction to Geography of Disaster” and “Chronology of the Occupation Regime: 1967-2007″, in Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni and Sari Hanafi (eds.) The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Zone Books, 2009). – “Gated/Gating Community: The Settlements’ array in the West Bank,” in Amnon Lehavi (ed.) Gated Communities in Israel (The Buchman Law Faculty, Tel Aviv University, 2009; in Hebrew).
- “Beyond Good and Evil – The Syndrome: Shame and Responsibility in Soldiers’ Testimonies”, Theory and Criticism Vol. 32 (spring 2008; in Hebrew).
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Yoav Kenny is a Ph.D. candidate at Tel-Aviv University’s School of Philosophy (dissertation title: Animality, Biopolitics and Vegetarianism: Towards a Political Understanding of Non-Human Animals), and holds an M.A. in philosophy from Tel- Aviv University (Thesis title: The Sovereign Instant: Sovereignty, Law and Time in Derrida and Agamben). His main research interests are political philosophy, continental philosophy, political theology, biopolitics, and critical animal studies.
Kenny is co-editor of Mafte’akh – A Lexical Review of Political Thought published by The Minerva Humanities Center and a teaching assistant in the advanced course in political philosophy at Tel Aviv University’s Philosophy Department. His project in the Lexicon group concerns the political conceptualization of the non-human animal.
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Roy Kreitner teaches contracts, jurisprudence, and commercial law at the Buchmann Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on private law theory, the legal history of contracts, and the history and theory of money. He is the author of Calculating Promises: The Emergence of Modern American Contract Doctrine (Stanford University Press, 2007), which won the American Society for Legal History’s 2007 Cromwell Book Prize. Kreitner, who earned his S.J.D. at Harvard University, has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Council for Higher Education in Israel, the Israel Science Foundation, the European Union’s TMR Network Project on European Private Law, and the Mark DeWolfe Howe Fund at Harvard Law School. This year (2009-10) Kreitner is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University.
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Shai Lavi is a senior lecturer and the director of the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law. He received his Ph.D. from the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at The University of California, Berkeley. His book The Modern Art of Dying: A History of Euthanasia in the United States (Princeton University Press) won the 2006 Distinguished Book Award in sociology of law from the American Sociological Association. Lavi was a Fulbright fellow at The University of California, Berkeley; a visiting professor at Toronto University; and a Humboldt fellow at The Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig and at the Faculty of Law at The Humboldt University, Berlin. He is currently working on the history of Jews and Muslims in Germany, with a special focus on the debate regarding animal slaughter rituals.
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Dotan Leshem is a postdoctoral fellow at The Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University and head of the research group on political economy in the Lexicon project. His research interests are the history of systems of thought, the history of economic thought, political economy, ecclesiastical economy, patristics, and political theory. His Ph.D. dissertation, which was written in the program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University, presents a genealogy of the definition of the economy and its intricate relationships with philosophical life, politics, and the law. It focuses on three moments in the history of the economy in the premodern era: the classical moment, the imperial moment, and the Christian moment. During his fellowship at The Minerva Humanities Center he will study the economy and its relation to politics, philosophy, and law in the modern age.
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Uzi Livneh received a B.A. in philosophy from Tel Aviv University and now is a Ph.D. candidate there. His dissertation concerns the political thought of Michel Foucault. His research in the Lexicon group will address the concept of political change/revolution and the various ways in which political thinkers and revolutionaries have conceptualized and tried to achieve radical change in the political and social fields.
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Itay Snir is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of philosophy at Tel-Aviv University. His dissertation, written under the supervision of Dr. Anat Matar, studies the concept of common-sense from philosophical and political perspectives. Snir received his M.A. (summa cum laude) from the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel-Aviv University, and his B.A. (summa cum laude) from the Philosophy Department and the Multidisciplinary Program in the Arts, also at TAU. He currently teaches philosophy at “Alon” high-school in Ramat-Hasharon and works as a teaching assistant at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. In the Lexicon project he studies the concept of common-sense.
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Roy Wagner holds a Ph.D. in mathematics (1997) and a Ph.D. in philosophy (2007) from Tel Aviv University. He has publishes papers in mathematics, philosophy, history of mathematics, and critical theory. Wagner teaches in the Computer Science Department at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Jaffa. In 2009 he published the book S(zp,zp): Post-Structural Readings of Gödel’s Proof. His project in the Lexicon group concerns the micropolitics of resistance from the margins. Relevant concepts include “state”, “resistance”, “definition”, and concepts related to various minorities.
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Noam Yuran completed his Ph.D. in the Philosophy Department at Ben-Gurion University. His dissertation deals with money as an object of desire. Yuran is the author of Channel 2 TV: The New Etatism (Resling, 2001; in Hebrew), and The Erotic Word: Three Readings in Hanoch Levin’s Work (Haifa University Press, 2002; in Hebrew). His research in the Lexicon project examines the social ontology of money.
