The 2019-20 Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr. Angy Cohen was born and raised in Madrid, Spain and moved to Israel in 2014. She has a BA in Psychology and a MA in Philosophy. She received her PhD in 2017 by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid in a Joint PhD program. Her doctoral dissertation was a comparative ethnographic study of the relation between memory and identity among Spanish-Moroccan Jews that emigrated to Israel and Argentina. She studied the impact the experience of immigration had on the memories the interviewees evoked in the interviews. Angy Cohen has received different fellowships and awards, including the Gaon Prize for research projects about Judeo-Spanish culture and the Rothschild (Hanadiv) doctoral fellowship.

Besides her academic activities, she is a member of the Beit Midrash (House of Learning) Arevot, lead by Sephardi women who explore Sephardi answers to the challenges of Modernity.

During her stay at the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies she will be preparing the publication of her PhD dissertation and working on the Spanish-Moroccan religious attitudes in the context of the encounter of Sephardi Judaism and Modernity as it occurred during the colonial period in Morocco.

The 2017-18 Postdoctoral Fellow

Sigal Barkai’s research focuses on the identities of contemporary Israeli artists who have chosen to live in Canada and the United States, or to move back and forth from Israel to North America. Her objective is to examine how these wanderings are reflected in their artwork, in terms of self-awareness, attitudes to the homeland, and choice of artistic expression. She is also interested in the ways these artists represent themselves to non-Israelis as compared to Israeli audiences.

During her stay at the Institute, Dr. Barkai will carry out her research on the Israeli visual art around the world.

The 2016-17 Postdoctoral Fellow

Amir Locker-Biletzki is a historian of the politics, culture and ideology of the Israeli Communist Party. His dissertation analyzed the creation of an Israeli-Jewish Communist subculture through the rites, myths and holidays of the Jewish Communists.

During his stay at the Azrieli Institute, Dr. Locker-Biletzki began work on a book manuscript, examining the way in which the Communists in Palestine/ Israel conceptualized the presence of Western (i.e. British and American) powers in the country and the rise of Zionist settler colonialism.          

The 2015-16 Postdoctoral Fellow

Aidan Beatty studied History and Political Science at Trinity College Dublin and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and graduated in 2009 with a first-class honours degree.  He holds an MA in Modern Jewish History from the University of Chicago and recently completed a PhD in International History.  His doctoral dissertation is a comparative study of masculinity in Zionism and Irish Nationalism, two minority European national movements, and draws on sources in English, Irish (Gaeilge), and Hebrew.  It was recently awarded the Adele Dalsimer Distinguished Dissertations Prize of the American Conference for Irish Studies.

During his time at the Azrieli Institute, he revised his PhD for publication with Palgrave-Macmillan as part of their Gender and Sexualities in History series, as well worked on journal articles on Irish nationalist perceptions of Jews and on settler-colonialism in Ireland and Israel-Palestine.   He also co-edited a collection of essays on Irish-Jewish history.