Introducing CSoC's Newest Board Members
Bruchim Haba'im - welcome!
Click HERE for the entire board of steering committee members.
Incoming Steering Committee Members
Prof. Oded Yisraeli - incoming CSoC director
Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought
Yisraeli served as head of the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev between 2019-2023. His main research areas are Kabbalah in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. His books include: The Interpretation of Secrets and the Secrets of Interpretation: Midrashic and Hermeneutic Strategies in Sabba de-Mishpatim of the Zohar, Los Angeles, 2005; Temple Portals: Studies in Aggada and Midrash in the Zohar, Magnes 2013 (Hebrew), Studia Judaica 88, de Gruyter, 2016 (English); Rabbi Moses b. Nahman (Nahmanides): An Intellectual Biography, Magnes 2021 (forthcoming in English by Stanford University Press). In recent years, his research has focused on Nahmanides' theological and kabbalistic doctrine and its reception.
Prof. Iris Idelson-Shein
Department of Jewish History
Idelson-Shein is an associate professor in the department of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her research interests include translation and cultural translation, Old Yiddish literature, and notions of gender, sexuality, and the body in early modern Europe. She is the author of Difference of a Different Kind: Jewish Constructions of Race During the Long Eighteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and Between the Bridge and the Barricade: Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024). She is also coeditor (with Christian Wiese) of a collected volume on Monsters and Monstrosity in Jewish History: From the Middle Ages to Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2019), and the chief editor of the JEWTACT Database. Her work has appeared in such journals as the American Historical Review, Eighteenth-Century Studies, AJS Review, and the Jewish Quarterly Review.
Dr. D. Gershon Lewental
Department of Middle East Studies
Lewental is a cultural historian of the Middle East, focusing on how societies use religion, memory, and conflict to define and maintain their identities. His fields of specialisation include Iranian history, early Islamic history and historiography, the Bahaʾi Faith, Ottoman Jewry, and minorities in the Middle East. He has written on literary narratives in the Arab-Islamic conquest of Iran, historical and nationalist symbolism in Iran, and the religious rhetoric of Saddam Husayn. He is currently completing a book (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press) on religious memory and mobilisation in Iran, Iraq, and Syria, among other projects. Since 2015, he has served as the associate editor of the Journal of Persianate Studies.
Dr. Amir Reicher
Department of Sociology & Anthropology
Reicher is a cultural anthropologist whose work lies at the intersection of political anthropology, anthropology of religion, settler-colonial studies, and political theory. He is a scholar of the West Bank settlement project, with a focus on questions of religion and ideology. His first research project is based on almost two years of fieldwork in the West Bank. He has published several articles on outpost settlers and is currently completing his book, Between Two Messiahs: An Ethnography of Outpost Settlers in the West Bank, in which he explores questions of messianism, post-messianism, and radicalization among second-generation settlers.
Dr. Ariel Seri-Levi
The Goren-Goldstein Department of Jewish Thought
Seri-Levi is a lecturer in the Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His research focuses on religious thought and the image of God in the Hebrew Bible, emotions in the Bible, biblical semantics, and the composition of the Pentateuch. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters in 2021–2022. His first book, which explores divine anger and conceptions of God in the Pentateuch, is forthcoming from Magnes Press. His current projects include: divine emotions in the Bible and the ancient Near East; the composition of the Jacob narratives; and the danger of seeing God in myth and cult.
Dr. Gal Sofer
Department of the Arts
Sofer is a senior lecturer in the Department of the Arts at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He has written on the history of magic and Kabbalah from the late Middle Ages to the modern period. His research interests include the transfer of knowledge across linguistic boundaries in Europe, the visualization of scientific, religious, and magical knowledge, and the visual aspects of magical literature. A medically trained physician (MD), he serves as an adjunct lecturer in the Faculty of Health Sciences. His first book, “Solomonic Magic: Methodology, Texts, and Histories,” was published by Brill in 2025.
