Raef Zreik is a graduate of The Hebrew University (LL.B., 1988; LL.M. magna cum laude, 1997), Columbia Law School (LL.M., 2001), and Harvard Law School (S.J.D., 2007). His Ph.D. dissertation deals with Kant’s concept of right. Zreik taught as a visiting professor at Georgetown Law School. Before taking this position, he taught at The University of Haifa and Tel Aviv University law schools and was a researcher at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. His research and teaching address questions related to legal and political theory, as well as citizenship and identity issues. He has published broadly in these areas, with work appearing in edited collections and in legal and interdisciplinary journals. His publications include: “Rights, Respect and the Political: Notes from a Conflict Zone” in Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Peace and Violence (edited by Elisabeth Weber and Thomas Carlson, forthcoming); “When Winners Lose: On Legal Language” in International Review of Victimology (forthcoming 2009); ”Notes on the value of theory” in the Journal of Law and Ethics of Human Rights (2007); “The Persistence of the Exception: Remarks on the Story of Israel Constitutionalism” in Thinking Palestine (edited by Ronit Lentin, 2007); “Palestine, Apartheid and Rights Discourse” in Journal of Palestine Studies (2004); and “Palestine as Exile” in Global Jurists (2003).
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Ronnen Ben-Arie is a doctoral candidate at the Division of Government and Political Theory at the School of Political Sciences at the Haifa University. His doctoral research examines the concept “Spaces of Resistance” in the political thought of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and explores possibilities for resistance and change in political order. Ben-Arie graduated the Architecture Department of the Bezalel Academy and holds a Masters degree from the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University. He is also a member of the research group for political and philosophical thought of space, which is part of the Lexicon Group for Political Thought at the Minerva Humanities Center.
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Joseph David is a faculty member in the Faculty of Oriental Studies and fellow in Wolfson College at Oxford. During the past few years he has lectured at the Oriental Institute (Oxford), Interdisciplinary Center (Herzliya), Haifa University, and Rutgers University. He was a fellow in the European Forum (Hebrew University), Hauser Global Law School (New York University), the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (University of Pennsylvania), IDI and Shalom Hartman Institute (Jerusalem). Dr. David is interested in the interfaces of law and theology and philosophy from the perspective of comparative legal history. His recent studies have focused on the epistemology of medieval legal systems, law and violence, law and nature, intra-religious tolerance, memory and transmission. His current study in the Minerva Humanities Center addresses various formations of belonging – family, community of faith, nation, state and territory.
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Ahmad Ighbaria is a lecturer of Arabic Language and Islamic Culture at Al-Qasemi College. His fields of expertise are Islamic philosophy, theology and logic.
Dr. Ighbaria attained his Ph.D (cum laude) from the Department of Philosophy at Haifa University, and his dissertation is entitled “The development of the Theory of Categories in Islamic philosophy”. His Masters Degree (cum laude) is from the Department of Arabic in Tel-Aviv University, about “Ibn Taymiyyah’s Critique of the Theory of Logical Definition”. In addition to his interest in classical Islamic Philosophy, Dr. Ighbaria is interested in modern Arabic thought, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, in issues like heritage and modernism. Among his publications is a translation into Hebrew of al-Farabi’s “Opinions of the People of the Perfect City”.
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Yoav Meyrav is a doctoral candidate at the School of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He is writing his dissertation on Al-Farabi’s (c. 870-950) concept of happiness (sa’adah) and is primarily interested in the introduction of Greek Philosophy into the Arabic world in medieval times, with an emphasis on matters of terminology and translation. In collaboration with Dr. Carlos Fraenkel of McGill University, Meyrav is currently working on an English translation of Themistius’ (4th Century AD) paraphrase of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Λ, which survived in its entirety only in Moses Ibn Tibbon’s 13th Century Hebrew translation.
