Board Members
Steering Committee
Prof. Oded Yisraeli
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. Jocelyne Cesari
Department of Middle East Studies
Cesari holds the Chair of Religion and Politics at the University of Birmingham (UK) and is a Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. From 2018 to 2024, she was the T. J. Dermot Dunphy Professor of Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding at Harvard Divinity School, and she served as President of the European Academy of Religion (2018–19).
Her work on religion and politics has earned international recognition, including the 2025 Susanne Hoeber Rudolph Outstanding Scholar Award of the American Political Science Association and the 2020 Distinguished Scholar Award of the Religion and International Relations section of the International Studies Association. She is a Distinguished Fellow of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and of the Royal Society of Arts (UK).
Her most recent book, We God's People: Political Christianity, Islam and Hinduism in the World of Nations (Cambridge University Press, 2022), received the 2023 Book Award of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Her other books include What Is Political Islam? (Lynne Rienner, 2018), winner of the 2019 Book Award of the Religion and International Relations section of the ISA; Islam, Gender and Democracy in a Comparative Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2017); and The Awakening of Muslim Democracy: Religion, Modernity and the State (Cambridge University Press, 2014). She is the academic advisor of www.euro-islam.info.
Prof. Jackie Feldman
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Yaakov and Poriah Avnon Chair in Holocaust Studies
Head of the Esther and Sidney Rabb Center for Holocaust Studies
Feldman's research interests are pilgrimage and tourism, anthropology of religion, Holocaust memory, ethnographic writing, heritagization and comparative study of museums. In addition to numerous articles in scholarly journals, he has published two books: Above the Death-pits, beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Holocaust Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity (Berghahn, 2008), and A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land: How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli (Indiana University Press, 2016). His current research project, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), is From the Era of the Witness to Digital Remembrance: New Media, Holocaust Sites and Performative Memory. This research examines how structures of authority, place memory, and social solidarities change as a result of widespread digital technologies and social media.
Prof. Nimrod Hurvitz
Department of Middle East Studies
Hurvitz has published on Muslim law, courts of law, the politics of theology, and modern and medieval socio-religious movements. His research interests are Islamic movements in the Middle Ages and modern times. His book The Formation of Hanbalism: Piety into Power (Routledge, 2002) was translated into Arabic in 2011. Together with Eli Alsheikh, he published Making Sense of Muslim Fundamentalisms: The Clash Within Islam (Routledge, 2020).
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 co-editor (with Christian Wiese) of the volume 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 journals including American Historical Review, Eighteenth-Century Studies, AJS Review, and 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 specialization include Iranian history, early Islamic history and historiography, the Bahá’í Faith, Ottoman Jewry, and minorities in the Middle East. He has written on literary narratives of the Arab-Islamic conquest of Iran, historical and nationalist symbolism in Iran, and the religious rhetoric of Saddam Hussein. He is currently completing a book (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press) on religious memory and mobilization 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.
Prof. Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner
Department Head of Jewish History
Shoham-Steiner is a historian specializing in medieval Jewish history. Between 2018–2021, he served as the Head of the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters (CSoC) at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His research focuses on the social aspects of Jewish history, with a special interest in the social information that can be extracted from rabbinic source material from medieval Western Europe. His first book, originally published in Hebrew under the title חריגים בעל כורחם: משוגעים ומצורעים בחברה היהודית באירופה בימי הביניים (Shazar Center, Jerusalem, 2007), was also published in English as On the Margins of a Minority (Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 2014). He edited the collected volume Intricate Interfaith Networks: Quotidian Jewish-Christian Contacts in the Middle Ages (History of Daily Life 5, Brepols, Turnhout, 2016). His second book, Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe (Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 2020), examines criminality and social order in medieval Jewish communities. His new book on the medieval Jewish community of Cologne, supported by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), is forthcoming.
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 (M.D.), he also 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.
Prof. Daniella Talmon-Heller
Department of Middle East Studies
Talmon-Heller is an associate professor whose research interests include the history and historiography of the medieval Middle East, Islamic thought and practice, and comparative religion. She is the author of Islamic Piety in Medieval Syria: Mosques, Cemeteries and Sermons under the Zangids and Ayyubids (Leiden, 2007) and Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East: An Historical Perspective (Edinburgh, 2020), and co-editor (with Katia Cytryn-Silverman) of Material Evidence and Narrative Sources: Interdisciplinary Studies of the History of the Middle East (Leiden, 2014). Currently, she is working on a research project entitled Sacred Scriptures as Sacred Objects: The Material Qurʾan and Torah in the Medieval Middle East, supported by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation.
Prof. Yana Tchekhanovets
Department of Bible Studies, Archaeology and the Ancient Near East
Tchekhanovets is an archaeologist specializing in late antique archaeology and the Christian communities of Byzantine Palestine. Her research focuses on various aspects of early Christianity in the Holy Land, with a special interest in monasticism and pilgrimage. She is the author of The Caucasian Archaeology of the Holy Land: Armenian, Georgian and Albanian Communities between the 4th and 11th Centuries CE (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Jerusalem: Excavations in the Tyropoeon Valley (Givati Parking Lot): The Byzantine and the Early Islamic Periods (with D. Ben-Ami; Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2020); Russian Excavations near the Holy Sepulchre Church in Jerusalem: Sources, Discussion, and Modern Interpretation (with L. Belyaev and K. Vach; Moscow: Institute of Archaeology RAS); and numerous scholarly articles. Tchekhanovets directed several archaeological excavations in Jerusalem and is currently directing the archaeological project at Nessana, focused on the archaeology of early Christian pilgrimage.
Past Members
Prof. Judith Weiss
Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought
Weiss studies medieval Jewish Kabbalah and Renaissance Christian Kabbalah. Her research focuses on the synchronic context in which Kabbalistic texts were produced, particularly the shared cultural discourse between Christians and Jews in Western Europe during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. She has published three books on the Kabbalistic thought of Guillaume Postel and a fourth book, in collaboration with Yehuda Liebes, on Egidio da Viterbo's treatise Scechina. Two major projects she is currently working on concern the broader cultural discourse in which Sefirotic ideas about feminine dimensions in the Godhead were developed, as well as the historical evolution of Sefer Yetzirah.
