Contemporary Religious Life
Asher Suzin
Suzin is a political scientist who received his PhD from the University of Haifa. His research focuses on the intersections of religion and politics, with a particular emphasis on Orthodox Judaism in Israel.
His recent research examines how religious communities redefine their political, national, and theological identities in response to modernity and public contestation. He studies the Jewish Orthodox Left in Israel, Modern Ultra-Orthodoxy, Ultra-Orthodox civil society organizations, and religious feminism. His current projects focus on Ultra-Orthodox Memorial Day ceremonies for fallen Israeli soldiers and the growing phenomenon of Ultra-Orthodox visits to the Temple Mount, exploring how these developments reshape the relationships between religion, nationalism, collective memory, and the state.
Suzin was a Research Fellow in the "Intertwined Worlds" Program at the Haifa Laboratory for Religious Studies, a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and has taught at Yezreel Valley College, Hadassah Academic College, and David Yellin Academic College of Education.
Jóhanna Jochumsdóttir
Jochumsdóttir received her PhD in history from Rutgers University, where she completed her dissertation under the direction of Dr. Seth Koven. As a global comparative historian, she focuses on transimperial encounters and evolving conceptions of religion. Her dissertation examined religious discourses in Edwardian suffrage circles, employing network prosopography to trace British and American women’s encounters with the late nineteenth-century Bahá’í community in the ‘Akka-Haifa region, and to reconstruct the correspondence and personal relationships that sustained them.
As a postdoctoral fellow at CSoC, she examines the concept of a “culture of learning” in the Bahá’í community, situating it within the broader twentieth-century historical context and debates on the role of religion and the relationship between local diversity and transnational cohesion. Jóhanna has taught at Rutgers University, The Open University, UK, and the Ottawa School of Theology and Spirituality.
Karen Levisohn
Levisohn is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research explores the intersections of entrepreneurship, tourism, and contemporary interreligious encounters. Her doctoral dissertation, Faith Encounters, conducted within the Faculty of Business and Management at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, examined how Jewish entrepreneurs operating in Israel's Christian tourism market in the Galilee navigate religious differences, foster interreligious tolerance, and contribute to contemporary Jewish-Christian relations from a management perspective.
Karen's academic research has followed a continuous line of inquiry into the relationships between entrepreneurship, tourism, religion, and place. She holds B.Sc. and M.B.A. degrees, both with honors, from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. She later completed an M.A. in Israel Studies at the University of Haifa, where her thesis examined the creation of modern Christian pilgrimage trails in the Galilee. Her postdoctoral research at CSoC builds on this line of research by examining the role of place identity in shaping interreligious entrepreneurship.
Karen serves as Head of the Interfaith Ambassadors Program within the M.A. Program in Religious Studies at the Haifa Laboratory for Religious Studies. She also teaches graduate courses in Business Entrepreneurship and Religious Tourism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the University of Haifa. Before entering academia, Karen held managerial and strategic positions in the high-tech industry in Israel and the United States.
Lior Aviv
Aviv received his PhD from the Department of Arts at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), under the supervision of Prof. Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby.
His dissertation examined a phenomenon in seventeenth-century Rome: sculpted effigies of laypeople positioned above their own tombs in private chapels, in a posture of prayer. The research focused on the tombs of two individual male figures (one of them by the famous Gianlorenzo Bernini) and six chapels containing tomb couples, across churches from that period and city.
These days, Aviv is a Postdoctoral Fellow at BGU, where he's deepening his research on tomb couples with praying effigies. At the same time, he's also working on a subject he researched during his M.A. studies, both at Haifa and Florence Universities: Bronzino's painting of St. Sebastian as a possible homoerotic image.
As a postdoctoral fellow at CSoC, his current research explores the concept of Gratitude in the Catholic Church of the same era, as expressed through ex-votos. The centrality of Gratitude was also emphasized in the teachings of Neville Goddard (1905–1972) and Dr. Joe Dispenza (born 1962), both of whom treat it as a key method for gaining mastery over reality and turning desires into lived experience. This research looks at how this shared concept plays out across these three distinct frameworks of thought, and how much control over reality we can really gain through this method.
Rivka Elitzur-Leiman
Elitzur-Leiman received her Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Professor Gideon Bohak. Her doctoral dissertation examined Jewish amulets from Late Antiquity, bringing together the study of material culture, ancient Jewish magic, epigraphy, and rabbinic literature.
Following her Ph.D., she spent three years in the United States holding postdoctoral fellowships at New York University, Harvard University (as a Harry Starr Fellow), and Fordham University. She was also a Visiting Fellow at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. For the past two years, she has been a Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her first monograph, Jewish Amulets from Late Antiquity, is forthcoming from Yad Ben-Zvi Press.
As a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters (CSoC), her current research explores the history of a collection of ancient magical artifacts assembled in early twentieth-century New York and the remarkable story of its collector, Mary Anna Draper. By tracing the lives of these objects beyond antiquity, the project sheds new light on the intersections of collecting, scholarship, religion, and the modern reception of the ancient world.
