AIS 2025 Award Winners

The Association of Israel Studies is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2025 annual awards:

Professor Michal Shamir and Professor Itamar Rabinovich from Tel Aviv University are the joint winners of the AIS Lifetime Achievement Award.

Dr. Tanya Zion-Waldoks and Dr. Nechumi Yaffe are the co-winners of the Gad Barzilai Early Career Award.

Honorable mention goes to Dr. Ian McGonigle

The co-winner of the Shapiro Award for Best Book in Israel Studies are Dr. Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar for her book Strictly Observant: Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women Negotiating Media (Rutgers University Press) and Omri Shafer Raviv for his book The Landlords: The Israeli Government and the Palestinians, 1967-1969, (The Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism).

Honorable Mentions go to Prof. Jonathan M. Gribetz for his book Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy (Princeton University Press) and Prof. Orit Rozin for her book Emotions of Conflict: Israel 1949-1967 (Oxford University Press, 2024).

The winner of the Ben Halpern Award for Best Dissertation in Israel Studies is Dr. Simcha Gueta-Bokovsa for her dissertation – “Hatzor HaGalilit: Shaping Local Identity in a Development Town (1949-1977)” (Tal-Hai College).

Honorable Mention goes to: Dr. Mordecai Miller for his dissertation “Interactions Between Kabbalah and Political Ideologies Amongst Jewish Orthodoxy in the State of Israel in the Late 20th Century and Early 21st Century” (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev).

Winners of the AIS Research Grants are:

The recipient of the AIS Research Grant is Dr. Niva Golan-Nadir for her research “Israeli public elementary school principals in the context of state-religion relations.”

The co-recipients of the AIS Dissertation Completion Fellowship are Liat Daudi for her dissertation An Ethnography of Waste Disposal in Israel: Masculinity, Ethnonationalism, Labor Relations and Environment (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) and Einat Kramer for her dissertation Between Theology and Environmental Practice: The Development of Environmental Discourse and Action in Israel through the Lens of Shemitah Amid the Climate Crisis (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem).

THIS YEAR’S AWARD WINNERS

This year the award committees considered many distinguished nominations, exceptional books and outstanding dissertations. Please join us in congratulating the 2025 awardees. See quotes by the award committee for each recipient below:

Itamar Rabinovich is the joint winner of the AIS Lifetime Achievement Award. Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University, Itamar Rabinovich is one of the field’s most influential figures over the past fifty years. A former Israeli ambassador to the United States and chief negotiator with Syria in the mid-1990s, he also served as President of Tel Aviv University (1999–2007). Today he leads the Dan David Foundation, which awards the world’s largest history prize, and serves as President Emeritus and Counselor of the Israel Institute in Washington and Tel Aviv.

Professor Rabinovich has authored numerous seminal books and articles on modern Middle Eastern history and politics. His public service includes visiting fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Toronto, as well as advisory roles to Israeli leadership. A member of the American Philosophical Society and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has also made sustained contributions to the Association for Israel Studies and to the global development of Israel Studies.

Across his careers as scholar, diplomat, and academic leader, Professor Rabinovich has demonstrated exceptional scholarship, mentorship, and institution‑building. His enduring impact and commitment to advancing Israel Studies make him a highly deserving recipient of the Association for Israel Studies’ Lifetime Achievement Award.

Michal Shamir is the joint winner of the AIS Lifetime Achievement Award. Professor Emerita at the School of Political Science at Tel Aviv University, Prof. Shamir is one of the leading scholars in her field in Israel and enjoys significant international recognition. Her research has focused on democratic politics, party systems, public opinion, political tolerance, and democratic culture, with particular emphasis on the Israeli context.

Since 1988, Professor Shamir has headed the Israeli National Election Studies (INES), and for many years she served as editor of the influential book series “The Elections in Israel,” which has become a central source for understanding political developments in the country.

Professor Shamir’s impact extends well beyond her research. She has mentored generations of students and scholars and serves on the editorial boards of leading journals in the field. In 2018, her contributions were recognized with the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Israeli Political Science Association.

Given her scholarly achievements, her influence on public discourse, and her profound contribution to the study and understanding of Israeli democracy, make him highly deserving of Honourable Mentioning by the Association of Israel Studies.

Dr. Tanya Zion-Waldoks is the co-recipient of the Gad Barzilai Early Career Award. Dr. Tanya Zion-Waldoks is a leading scholar in the sociology of religion, whose research centers on gender, religious identity, and political agency within Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox communities. Her work challenges entrenched paradigms and offers a nuanced understanding of the dynamic interplay between feminism and religious tradition. By highlighting the voices and experiences of religious women, Dr. Zion-Waldoks opens new avenues for public discourse on inclusion, democracy, authority, and transformation. Her scholarship is both academically rigorous and deeply engaged with contemporary social and ethical debates – a reflection of the public intellectualism that Prof. Barzilai championed.

Dr. Nechumi Yaffe is the second co-recipient of the Gad Barzilai Early Career Award. Dr. Yaffe is a pioneering figure in the field of public policy and behavioral economics, and the first woman from Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community to hold a faculty position at a secular university. Her research addresses pressing issues such as poverty, social inequality, and intergenerational mobility, with a particular focus on marginalized and underrepresented populations, especially on Ultra-Orthodox communities. Combining robust empirical methodologies with cultural insight, Dr. Yaffe’s work contributes significantly to informed policymaking and social reform. Her ability to bridge cultural gaps and bring academic knowledge into the realm of public policy strongly aligns with Prof. Barzilai’s belief in scholarship as a tool for democratic empowerment.

Honorable mention goes to Dr. Ian McGonigle whose work stands out for its intellectual originality and interdisciplinary depth. Dr. McGonigle is a scholar of science, technology, and society, with a unique focus on the intersection of genetics, governance, identity, and ethics. Dr. Ian McGonigle’s research in Israel Studies specifically explores how genetics, religion, and nationalism shape identities in Israeli society. His work includes both academic writing and ethnographic filmmaking, offering insights into the intersection of science, religion, and politics in Israel and in the Middle East.

The first co-winner of the Shapiro Award for Best Book in Israel Studies is Dr. Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar for her book Strictly Observant: Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women Negotiating Media, (Rutgers University Press). Dr.Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar’s meticulously crafted, methodologically sophisticated, well-written, and pathbreaking comprehensive study delves into the lives of Amish and Haredi women, focusing on their complex attitudes toward media, their perceptions of media, and their patterns of media consumption. It is based upon a sound combination of qualitative and quantitative research as well as combined research tools including questionnaires, participant observations, and interviews. The result is a multi-layered analysis of these women’s boundary management of tradition and modernity, time, patterns of traveling, borderlines between them and surrounding societies and cultures, all interwoven between reality, images, and perceptions. This study has the potential to influence the scholarly study of and discourse on religion in Israeli society and lead it in new directions, and thus well-worthy of the Shapiro Book Prize.

Dr. Omri Shafer Raviv is the second co-winner of the Shapiro Award for Best Book in Israel Studies for his book The Landlords: The Israeli Government and the Palestinians, 1967-1969, (The Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism). While much of the discourse on Israel’s rule in the West Bank and Gaza focuses on present-day solutions, little is known about its formative years. This groundbreaking historical study uses newly declassified archival sources to explore the dilemmas and developments between 1967 and 1969. Shafer Raviv carefully navigates the perspective of the Israeli “landlords,” offering nuanced and high-resolution snapshots of competing views. His thoughtful and well-structured analysis sheds light on decisions that continue to shape Israel’s society, leadership, economy, and demography. This book is a major contribution to the field and is poised to become essential reading for scholars and anyone interested in this pivotal moment in Israeli history.

The first Honorable Mention goes to Prof. Jonathan M. Gribetz for his book Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy, (Princeton University Press). Jonathan Gribetz’s study skillfully unfolds the founding of the Research Center of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the hardships of tracing relevant personalities and documents, the aims of this Center, its leadership, active members, and publications. All these lead to describing and analyzing topics that were perceived of importance regarding Judaism, Zionism, Israel, Israeli history and society, and various carefully chosen manifestations of American and Oriental Jewries, with a view to understanding contemporary Israel. By doing so Gribetz offers a unique and thus far overlooked perspective within Israel Studies, one that merits honorable mentioning.

The second Honorable Mention goes to Prof. Orit Rozin for her book Emotions of Conflict: Israel 1949-1967 (Oxford University Press, 2024). The accumulative body of historical-critical knowledge regarding the first two and formative decades of the State of Israel, 1949-1967, is broad and immense. Topics include State building, wars, diplomacy, politics, the judicial system, religion, state, and Jewish identity, Israeli demography, culture, press, and popular culture, and Arab and Palestinian societies. Nevertheless, certain topics remain overlooked, and one of them is the history of emotions during this period. In this pathbreaking study, Orit Rozin explores the emotions and emotional repertoire of Israel as a society versus the Arab-Israeli conflict from 1949 to 1967, and does so by snap-shotting it from different points of view, such as grassroots citizenry, cultural agents, and Israeli political leadership. This, based upon a rich and diverse set of sources, a great deal of them unexplored thus far and others known and documented but not scrutinized through the lenses of the history of emotions. This novel approach and detailed account merits honorable mentioning.

Dr. Simcha Gueta-Bokovsa is the winner of the Halpern Award for Best Dissertation in Israel Studies for her dissertation—”Hatzor HaGalilit: Shaping Local Identity in a Development Town (1949-1977)” (Tal Hai College). Dr. Gueta‑Bokovsa’s dissertation offers a vibrant microhistory of Hatzor HaGalilit’s first three decades, exploring its spatial, economic, social, cultural, and political evolution. By interweaving detailed local narratives with Israel’s broader immigrant‑absorption and periphery‑formation story, she illustrates how Zionist policies – both a tribute to national ideals and a source of hardship – imposed poverty, displacement, and strict nationalist obligations on newcomers. Yet her pioneering study reveals the agency of this marginalized community: despite scarce resources and rigid expectations, residents forged paths to rebuild their lives, thrive, and secure a future for their children. Gueta‑Bokovsa shows how these settlers embraced a narrative of hope, transforming adversity into collective strength. In centering the resilience and experiences of Israel’s peripheral populations, her work sheds new light on the country’s formative years and the critical role of local agency in nation‑building.

Honorable Mention goes to Dr. Mordecai Miller for his dissertation “Interactions Between Kabbalah and Political Ideologies Amongst Jewish Orthodoxy in the State of Israel in the Late 20th Century and Early 21st Century” (Ben-Gurion University). Dr. Miller’s study takes on a critically important issue: not simply the intersection between religion and politics but also the factors that move a religious community, presumably totally immersed in spirituality, decisively into the realm of politics to engage in an unvarnished struggle for political power. Dr. Miller has assembled biographical material on Rabbis from across the ultra-orthodox spectrum. He probes the texts they study and the commentaries they have written. His impressive grasp of contemporary social and political theory allows him to explain how and why these traditional views become important resources for politicians in their competition for seats in the Knesset or on Local Councils. Dr. Miller’s dissertation is the groundwork for putting today’s headlines in their proper context.

The winner of the Kimmerling Award for Best Graduate Paper is Alisa Abramov for her paper “Leadership of the Mountain Jews in the North Caucasus and Its Eastern Regions and the Zionist Movement (1900-1925): The Struggle for Aliyah and Settlement.” Ms. Abramov’s excellent paper analyzes an aspect of the history of Zionism, which has been largely forgotten. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Mountain Jews (Juhuro) speaking a Jewish-Persian dialect, were part of the early aliyah to Eretz Israel. Abramov explores the ongoing struggle of these Mountain Jews and their leaders for recognition and acceptance by the Zionist movement. Their experience, the paper shows, sheds light on a much more diverse set of policies and attitudes on the part of Zionist leadership towards Jews moving to Palestine. The paper brilliantly uncovers a complex dynamic between center and periphery in the early Zionist movement, highlighting the difficulties and frustrations of non-European Jews.

We would also like to extend a hearty Thank You to all of the hard and dedicated work of the award committees:

The Lifetime Achievement Award Committee

Eyal Zisser, Chair, With Naomi Chazan, Ariel Bendor, Cary Nelson, Ilan Peleg, Russell Stone

The Gad Barzilai Early Career Award Committee

Sylvie Fogiel-Bijaoui, Chair, With Elie Podeh, Alan Dowty , Ilan Troen , Noya Rimalt, Ami Pedhazur

The Yonathan Shapiro Best Book Award Committee

Kimmy Caplan, Chair, With Artur Skorek, Niva Golan-Nadir, Adia Mendelson-Maoz, Assaf Likhovski, Itamar Radai

The Ben Halpern Best Dissertation Award Committee

Donna Robinson Divine, Chair, With Osnat Akirav, Moti Gigi, Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman, Elisheva Rosman-Stollman, Pierre Anctil

The Baruch Kimmerling Best Graduate Student Paper Committee

Joel Migdal, Chair, With Natan Aridan, Meital Pinto, Guy Ziv, Avraham Sela, Laura Wharton

The AIS Research Grant Committee

Mohammed Wattad, Chair, With Taro Tsurumi, Kiril Feperman, Ilan Ben-Ami, Isabell Schierenbeck, Miri Talmon

The Dissertation Completion Fellowship Committee

Brian Horowitz, Chair, With Ola Abu-Hasan Nabwani, Yuval Benziman, Ofira Gruweis-Kovalsky, Eli Sperling, Joanna Dyduch

The Archive Grant Committee

Paula Kabalo, Chair, With Arnon Golan, Steven Zipperstein, Vered Weiss, Reuven Gafni, Sigal ben-Rafael, Yuri Keum

Sincerely,

The AIS Executive