Experts

Yohanan (Johan) Plesner is President of the Israel Democracy Institute. In 2006, he became the first Secretary-General of Israel's new ruling party, Kadima, and spearheaded the creation of the party's organizational infrastructure. From 2007 to 2013, he served as a Member of Knesset and was a member of the Constitution, Law and Justice, and Defense and Foreign Affairs Committees, Co-chair of the Knesset Lobby for Higher Education, and Chairman of the Knesset's permanent delegation to the Council of Europe.

 

 Jesse Ferris joined IDI in the fall of 2008 as Vice President of Strategy. His responsibilities include international programming and development. Jesse received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2008. His research interests include democracy and foreign policy, international politics of the Middle East, and Israeli national security.

Yuval Shany joined IDI as a senior researcher in 2008, and has worked since then in the Institute’s Security and Democracy Program (now the Amnon Lipkin-Shahak Program on National Security and Democracy)

Among other things, he has researched questions of security detention, interrogation techniques, on-line surveillance, military investigations, proportionality in the application of force, jurisdiction of international criminal tribunals and counter-terrorism. In January, 2018 Prof. Shany assumed the position of Vice President of Research at IDI.

Prof. Karnit Flug joined IDI in June 2019 as its Vice President of Research and the William Davidson Senior Fellow for Economic Policy.

Prof. Karnit Flug completed her five-year term as Governor of the Bank of Israel in November 2018. In March 2019 she joined the Department of Economics at the Hebrew University. 

As Governor, Prof. Flug oversaw the design and implementation of Israel's monetary policy and served as the Economic Advisor to the government. She was widely credited for maintaining stability and supporting growth in the Israeli economy.

Daphna Aviram-Nitzan is the former head of the migration research unit at Aharon Meir Center for Banking and Economic Policy at Bar-Ilan University and the former director of the economic research division at the Manufacturers Association of Israel.

 

Dr. Shuki Friedman is the Director of the Center for Religion, Nation and State. He is a member of the Faculty of Law at the Peres Academic Center and formerly served as secretary of the Locker Committee for Examining the Defense Budget. He was also chairman of the government committee on the sanctions against Iran, and headed the international and foreign law department for the legal division of the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office.

Professor Amichai Cohen is a member of the Faculty of Law at Ono Academic College. He earned his LL.B. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his LL.M. and LL.D. from Yale Law School at Yale University.

Professor Yuval Feldman is a full professor at the Faculty of Law at Bar-Ilan University and a former fellow of Institutional Corruption Lab at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

 Prof. Tamar Hermann is the Academic Director of the Guttmann Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research.   

A faculty member of the Political Science Department at the Open University of Israel, Professor Tamar Hermann has co-edited the monthly Peace Index (with Professor Ephraim Ya’ar) since 1994, and has edited the annual Israeli Democracy Index since 2010.

Dr. Nasreen Hadad Haj-Yahya holds an MA in education and social geography and is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at Tel Aviv University. The topic of her doctoral dissertation is, “The contemporary impact of social space barriers on the inaction and future orientation of young Arabs aged 18–22.”

Prof. Mordechai Kremnitzer is Vice President of Research at IDI and has been an IDI Senior Fellow since 1994. He currently heads IDI’s Democratic Principles, National Security and Democracy, Arab-Jewish Relations, and Proportionality in Public Policy projects.

 

Dean of the Faculty of Law at Bar-Ilan University, is considered a leading scholar of family law and responsible for shaping civil law theory in that field.

Dr. Gilad Malach is the Director of IDI's Ultra-Orthodox in Israel program. He co-authored the Master Plan for Ultra-Orthodox Employment (along with Doron Cohen and Haim Zicherman) and was editor of the Statistical Report on Ultra-Orthodox Society in Israel (in copperation with Dr. Lee Cahaner and Dr. Maya Choshen). He was director of implementation of the Gabison-Meidan Covenant Project at the Avi Chai Foundation and content manager of the Committee on Sharing the Security Burden in the Eighteenth Knesset.

 

Professor Margalit headed a large, experimental cross-national study of the investment decisions of multinational firms, a project that he developed and carried out in collaboration with the World Bank and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.

Professor Rahat is a faculty member of the Political Sciences Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an International Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine.

Dr. Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler is a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and head of the institute’s Media Reform Program and Democracy in the Information Age Program.

She holds a doctorate in law (LLD) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and completed her post-doctoral studies at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. 

She is a board member of the Israel National Press Council, a board member of the Israeli Digital Rights Movement, a board member of the Center for Ethics in Jerusalem and a member of the Supreme Council of Archives of the State of Israel.

In recent years, Dr. Shwartz Altshuler has composed the journalistic code of ethics for Israel’s public broadcasting corporation (“Kan”) and for the Globes business newspaper; drafted a bill for a new privacy law in Israel; and appeared regularly in the Israeli and international media on issues relating to media, technology, democracy, and human rights. She has also published a number of books, articles, policy studies, and expert opinions on these subjects.

Professor Yedidia Z. Stern is a Senior Fellow, Center for Religion Nation and State; Academic Director, Human Rights and Judaism Program.

He holds a master's degree in sociology and anthropology from Bar-Ilan University. He is currently in the final stages of his Ph.D. on New masculinity, father involvement and family-work interface, in the Department of Sociology at Bar-Ilan University.

Adv. Rachel Aridor Hershkovitz is a researcher in the Israel Democracy Institute’s Media Reform program and a research fellow at the Haifa Center for Law and Technology at the University of Haifa.

Dr. Dana Blander is a research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and a clinical psychologist. Her PhD. dissertation – “Ambivalence as a Challenge to the Political Order”-- which combines political philosophy along with psycho-analytical insights, was awarded the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Berger Prize for 2008. In the 2010-2011 academic year, Blander was a visiting lecturer at Tufts University in Boston.

Her research focuses on Israeli politics: referendums, private legislation, civic participation, and state and parliamentary investigative committees. Blander is a co-author (along with Prof. Yitzhak Galnoor) of “The Handbook of Israel’s Political System”, published by Cambridge University Press (2018). She also co-authored a book on anti-democratic legislation with Prof. Mordechai Kremnitzer and Dr. Amir Fuchs, as well as a book on human dignity and medical treatment with Carmit Haber and Prof. Mordechai Kremnitzer.

Dr. Blander oversees the research at the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) and is editor of the online magazine “Parliament”, published on the IDI website. 

An expert on ultra-Orthodox Judaism and its religious formation. The author of the book The Chazon Ish, Brown did his post-doctoral work at Harvard University.

A social geographer and the head of the Interdisciplinary Studies Department, and a senior lecturer in the Geography and Environmental Studies Department at Oranim Academic College of Education.

Dr. Chen Friedberg has co-written many papers published by the Israel Democracy Institute.

Dr. Amir Fuchs holds a doctorate from the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is a lecturer in the Politics and Communication Department at the School of Government and Social Sciences at Hadassah Academic College.

Researcher, Human Rights and Judaism Program

Dr. Eliezer Hadad is the coordinator of the MA program in Biblical Studies at Herzog College and a lecturer in Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of The Relationship between Nature and the Torah in Maimonides’ Writings, as well as the policy papers Minorities in the Jewish State and The Status of Women in the Rabbinical Courts.

Areas of expertise

The principle of equality in the Jewish sources; Maimonidean philosophy; Jewish philosophy.

Head of the Program on Combatting Government Corruptionof the Program on Combatting Government Corruption

Dr. Ofer Kenig is a senior lecturer in Ashkelon Academic College and a research fellow in Israel Democracy Institute. His areas of research include comparative politics, political parties, leadership and candidate selection and Israeli politics. He co-authored the books Reforming Israel's Political System (2013), The Promise and Challenge of Party Primary Elections (2016) and From Party Politics to Personalized Politics (2018).

A senior lecturer in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Bar-Ilan University, an MA advisor in the department, and acting head of the organizational consulting project.

 

Dr. Guy Lurie is a lawyer and received his PhD in History from Georgetown University (2013). Dr. Lurie is a former coordinator of the Shamgar Commission for the Formulation of Rules of Ethics for Members of the Government, and served as a post-doctoral fellow on the Faculty of Law at the University of Haifa.

In addition to her work at IDI, Nechumi Yaffe is a faculty member in the Department of Public Policy at Tel Aviv University. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University's Daniel Kahneman Center of Behavioral Science and Public Policy and the University Center for Human Values.

Nechumi’s research examines how identity, social norms, and rabbinic authority play a role, from a social psychology perspective, in generating and perpetuating poverty. Her work focuses on the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community in Israel and the USA.

Before embarking on her doctoral studies, she served as an adviser to the ultra-Orthodox educational system, where she wrote a new curriculum and textbook in history for use in all Israeli Haredi high schools.

Nechumi earned a Ph.D. in political science from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is the first woman from Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community to do so.

Nadiv Mordechay is the Research Coordinator of the Center for Democratic Values and Institutions at the Israel Democracy Institute; and a research fellow at the Cheshin Center for Advanced Legal Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His areas of research focus on Constitutional and Administrative law, constitutional theory and judicial review.

Nadiv clerked at the Supreme Court and at the office of the Attorney General. Between 2011-2015 he was a research assistant at the Israel Democracy Institute; between 2015-2017, he served as the Secretary-General of the Israeli branch of the International Society of Public Law (ICON) and was the founding editor of the ICON-S-IL blog. As a doctoral student, he was a visiting scholar at the New York University School of Law (NYU).

Mr. Rudnitzky is a PhD student who has been researching Arab Israeli issues for more than a decade. His fields of expertise cover political, national and social developments in Israel's Arab society; Jewish-Arab relations; and government policies on Arabs in Israel. Rudnitzky holds MA (magna cum laude) and BA degrees in Middle Eastern History from the Faculty of Humanities and an MBA degree from the Faculty of Management, both at Tel Aviv University. 

Adv. Oded Ron holds an LL.M. from the Human Rights Cathedral at College of Management Academic Studies and LL.B. from the Faculty of Law at the Bar-Ilan University
Interned at the legal department at ACRI: Association for Civil Rights Israel

Dr. Eitan Regev is an economist and a Research Fellow at Israel Democracy Institute. He is regarded as one of the leading experts in research of the Ultra-Orthodox economy in Israel. Dr. Regev's research encompasses a variety of fields, including labor productivity, the Haredi economy, the cost of living, food insecurity, and the Israeli health system. 

A Post-doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Law at Tel-Aviv University, Idit Shafran Gittleman holds an MA in philosophy from the University of Haifa.

Assaf Shapira received a PhD in Political Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and at the Centre d’études européennes (Center for European Studies) at the Sciences po (Paris). His research largely focuses on political representation, political parties, the role of money in politics, and reforms in Israel's public service.

A researcher, journalist, author, and publicist, Yair Sheleg has been an astute observer of the religious-Zionist world for many years.

The topics of Dr. Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan’s studies are the politics of investigative committees, the effect of reputation on government agencies, the judicial proportionality of experts, and the effect of corruption in the public sector and the resulting judicial intervention on voter behavior.

Dr. Raphael Ventura is the director of the data archive of the Guttman Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research at the Israel Democracy Institute.

IDI Researcher Prof. Reuven (Ruvi) Ziegler explores questions of immigration, asylum, and citizenship as part of IDI's Democratic Principles project. He is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Reading.

Dr. Dana Blander is a research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and a clinical psychologist. Her PhD. dissertation – “Ambivalence as a Challenge to the Political Order”-- which combines political philosophy along with psycho-analytical insights, was awarded the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Berger Prize for 2008. In the 2010-2011 academic year, Blander was a visiting lecturer at Tufts University in Boston.

Her research focuses on Israeli politics: referendums, private legislation, civic participation, and state and parliamentary investigative committees. Blander is a co-author (along with Prof. Yitzhak Galnoor) of “The Handbook of Israel’s Political System”, published by Cambridge University Press (2018). She also co-authored a book on anti-democratic legislation with Prof. Mordechai Kremnitzer and Dr. Amir Fuchs, as well as a book on human dignity and medical treatment with Carmit Haber and Prof. Mordechai Kremnitzer.

Dr. Blander oversees the research at the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) and is editor of the online magazine “Parliament”, published on the IDI website.