Whose Land is it Anyway? February 5, 2009

Lecture about the current Israel/Palestine conflict.
Dr. Ilan Troen is the Stoll Family Professor in Israel Studies at Brandeis University and Director of Brandeis’ Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. The Stoll Chair is the first such specifically dedicated Chair in the United States. The Schusterman Center, established in 2007 with an initial endowment of $30 million, is the largest such center outside of Israel. Before coming to Brandeis, Professor Troen was the founding Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and Director of the Ben-Gurion Research Institute and Archives, a national research center along the lines of an American presidential library. He has authored or edited 11 books in American, Jewish and Israeli history. He is also the founding editor of Israel Studies (published by Indiana University Press), the leading journal in this new field. His most recent books are Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America (Yale, 2001); Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement (Yale, 2003), and with Jacob Lassner, Jews and Muslims in the Arab World: Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined (Roman and Littlefield, 2007). Ilan Troen was born in Boston, and educated in the US (Ph.D., University of Chicago) and Israel (Hebrew University of Jerusalem). He made aliyah in 1975 and, when not at Brandeis, makes his permanent home in Omer, a community outside Beer-Sheva in the northern Negev.