KIVUNIM

KIVUNIM’s Director of our Gap-year Program is Jay Leberman who served as Head of School of the Perelman Jewish Day School in Philadelphia from 1997 until 2013.  Prior to that he was Head of School of the Sager Solomon Schechter Day School in Northbrook, Illinois from 1985-1997. In Chicago and Philadelphia he received national recognition for having created exemplary special needs programs integrated within the day school structure for students with multiple needs - academic, social, behavioral, and physical. 

 

Jay is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Oxford University, Oriental Institute and the Oxford Centre for (Postgraduate) Hebrew and Jewish Studies. In addition, he was a fellow at the Senior Educators Program of the Melton Center of the Hebrew University.   During his studies in England he taught high school in Liverpool, England; Carmel College, Oxfordshire; and was a lecturer at the Leo Baeck College for Progressive Judaism, London. Jay’s association with KIVUNIM began early with our summer teachers’ institute and through his leadership over 100 teachers, secretaries, maintenance personnel and other staff members from Perelman Jewish Day School attended Kivunim programs in Israel and elsewhere.  

 

He is an avid outdoorsman and loves hiking, camping, birdwatching, scuba diving, and has traveled extensively throughout the world. He has four children (three living in Israel). We are excited to have Jay in the KIVUNIM family.

 

 

Some of the most thoughtful and creative individuals in the Jewish world today are KIVUNIM’s teachers. They produce thought-provoking material for class discussion providing the opportunity to study contemporary Israel in the context of its historic past and its yet unrealized future.  While preparing our students for our international travel experiences in intensive units on the history and civilization (art, music, architecture, economics, geography, religion, politics, etc.) of the countries we will be visiting, they provide our college freshman the rare opportunity to learn from experienced and senior faculty.  Their lectures are followed by smaller sections led by graduate student teaching assistants.  The KIVUNIM year is divided into five mini-mesters that precede each 12-14 day international trip. 

 

We are committed to providing inspiration and access for our students. We want them to encounter the great minds and historic contributors to contemporary Jewish life and culture. We believe that the next generation of communal leadership needs to be challenged and motivated to dream, to design and ultimately to establish new vehicles of meaning and of social and cultural change and advancement. Having time to study and talk with a wide range of creative thinkers and doers is central to KIVUNIM’s program.

 

One of KIVUNIM’s innovations is the inclusion of Arabic Language instruction in addition to Hebrew.

Arabic Instructor, Amal Abusif is an award-winning teacher in the Haifa School System and co-existence activist. She is (to the best of our knowledge) the first Arab, Muslim, Woman ever to hold a senior staff position in a program of Jewish education. She holds a BA and MA in education from Haifa University and is currently a Phd student at Ben Gurion University. Amal also coordinates our coexistence education program. 

 

Atara Arad is our our Hebrew Language instructor.  Atara is a highly experienced educator having served as Principal of one of the most innovative schools in Israel.  She has also taught in both Day Schools and on the university level in the United States and in Israel and brings years of classroom experience to her work. She has been teaching Hebrew to KIVUNIM students since 2007.

 

Dr. David Mendelsohn teaches the unit on Greece prior to our first trip of each year. His areas of expertise include Islamic Studies, History and Culture of Arabs with Israeli Citizenship, Bedouin Law and the relationship between language and culture in Arabic and Hebrew. His current research examines the influence of Hebrew on the dialects of Arabic spoken in Israel. Mendelsohn also lectures on the history and relationships between Middle East countries and militant organizations.  David holds advanced degrees in diverse fields: a Ph.D. Classics / Linguistics, an M.A. in Archaeology / Linguistics and an Honours B.A. in Classical Studies.  David is the recipient of one of Canada’s highest academic honors, The Trudeau Prize which provided him with a four year stipend to continue his studies worth over $200,000.

 

Dr. Ari Varon teaches our Middle East Studies Course: Perspectives of Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. He served as the Deputy Foreign Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister of Israel from April 2005 through April 2009. His responsibilities included assisting in the preparation of the Prime Minister in all matters relating to Israeli foreign policy. Ari’s Ph.D. in Political Science was co- advised from two institutions: the University of Sciences Po located in Paris, France as well as at Tel Aviv University in Israel. His dissertation focused on the formation of an Islamic political identity in contemporary Europe. Before working at the Prime Minister's office Ari received his Masters degree in International Relations from Johns Hopkins SAIS in Washington DC with a dual concentration in strategic studies and international law and a specialization in quantitative international economics. In conjunction with his studies in Washington he worked part time at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy. He obtained his Bachelors degree in political science from the University of California at Berkeley.

 

Dr. Shalva Weil prepares KIVUNIM for our annual journey to India.  She is editor of India's Jewish Heritage (March 2002), co-editor of Indo-Judaic Studies in the Twenty-First Century: A Perspective from the Margin (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), and co-editor with Prof. David Shulman of Karmic Passages: Israeli Scholarship on India (OUP 2008). She is Senior Researcher at the Research Institute for Innovation in Education at the Hebrew University. She has published over 60 articles and chapters on the Bene Israel, Cochin Jews, Baghdadi Jews, and the Shinlung ("Bnei Menasseh").

 

Dr. Ross Brann flies in each year for an intensive week of inspired teaching in preparation for our travels to Spain.  He is Milton R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies at Cornell University.  Ross studied at the University of California, Berkeley, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, New York University, and the American University in Cairo. He has taught at Cornell since 1986 and served fourteen years as Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies, completing his fourth term in 2006. Professor Brann is the author of The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), recipient of the 1992 National Jewish Book Award in Sefardic Studies, and author of Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Muslims and Jews in Islamic Spain (Princeton University Press, 2002). Brann is also the editor of four volumes and author of essays on the intersection of medieval Jewish and Islamic cultures. He is currently working on Andalusi Moorings: Al-Andalus and Sefarad as Tropes of Muslim and Jewish Culture for the University of Pennsylvania Press. 

 

Shalmi Barmore teaches the KIVUNIM unit on Central Europe and accompanies us on our journey to Budapest, Prague and Berlin. For many years he was the Director of Education at Yad Vashem. He has taught history at the Hebrew University School for Overseas Students. Over the past years Shalmi has helped reshape the face of Holocaust education, designing curriculum for both Israeli and American school systems. He served as historical consultant to the film “Shoah,” visiting director to the Martyr’s Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust in Los Angeles, consultant to the Education Committee of the U.S. Holocaust Commission AND and has produced several documentaries about the Holocaust. 

 

Dr. Renee Levine Melammed rounds out our preparation for KIVUNIM’s  historic journey to Spain.  She is Dean of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem.  Renee holds a PhD from Brandeis University with her dissertation on  "Women in Spanish Crypto-Judaism, 1492-1520" Medieval and Early Modern History of the Jews and Conversos of Spain. She is Academic Editor, Nashim, Journal of Jewish Women's and Gender Studies.  She has published Heretics or Daughters of Israel: The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 and A Question of Identity: Iberian Conversos in Historical Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004 and served as Editor, Lift Up Your Voice with Strength: Women's Voices and Feminist Interpretation in Jewish Studies [Hebrew]. Yediot Ahronot, 2001.

 

Dr. Joseph Benatov teaches our unit in preparation for our trip to Bulgaria.  He holds a BA and MA from Sofia University and a doctorate in comparative literature and literary theory from the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation is entitled “Looking in the Iron Mirror: Eastern Europe in the American Imaginary, 1958-2001.” He has also written on Jewish identity politics in Philip Roth’s early fiction; the sensationalism of U.S. representations of life behind the Iron Curtain; and competing national narratives of the saving of the Bulgarian Jews during World War II. Dr. Benatov has also taught Hebrew for a number of years and has translated Israeli poetry and drama, including a play by Hanoch Levin, staged to wide acclaim in Sofia, Bulgaria. 

 

Dr. Alon Liel prepares our students for our vital experience in Turkey.  He holds B.A., M.A. and PhD degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on “The Dependence of Imported Energy and its Impact on Turkey's Foreign Policy” in 1986. Alon served the Israeli Foreign Ministry in various positions: as head of the Israeli mission in Turkey (1981-1983), the Foreign Ministry spokesman and the member of the Israeli negotiating team at the Taba talks with Egypt (1985–1987), Ambassador to South Africa in (1992-1994), Director General of the Ministry of Economy and Planning (1994-1996), Foreign Policy Advisor to Ehud Barak (1997-1999), Director General of the Foreign Ministry (2000-2001). He is the author of several books including Turkey in the Middle East – Oil, Islam and Politics (1993), Black Justice – The South African Upheaval (1999), Turkey – The Military, Islam and Politics (1999), Turkey in the Middle East (2001), Demo Islam, Turkey’s New Regime (2003). He has taught courses at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University on Turkey and the Middle East politics.

 

 

MORE BIOS COMING SOON...There are many more faculty!