Previous Fellows Academic Program

Alex Bryan is a political philosopher with research interests in republican political thought, theories of freedom, economic justice, and various topics in applied ethics. He received his PhD from King’s College London in 2020. His doctoral thesis provided an account of the economic commitments that emerge from the republican conception of freedom as non-domination, with a particular focus on the attitude that republican theorists should take towards capitalist forms of economic organisation. Prior to this, Alex studied for undergraduate and masters degrees at the University of York.

Alex’s current research has two strands. The first of these involves the exploration of two central economic and legal concepts - market power and property - through a republican conceptual framework, while the second considers whether and how the value of non-domination can ground normative engagement with political action.

Assaf holds a BA (Behavioral Sciences) and MA (Organizational Sociology) from Ben-Gurion University and was a PhD student at Tel-Aviv University (the department of Labor Studies). During his doctoral studies he also held visiting positions in The Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labor Studies (currently AIAS-HIS), in the Center for the Sociology of Organizations (at Science-Po, Paris) and at Cardiff Business School (at Cardiff University). Since receiving his PhD, Assaf held numerous positions, as a Postdoctoral Fellow in The Hebrew University (Jerusalem) and The University of California, Los-Angeles (UCLA) and served as a Research Fellow at the Law Faculty at Tel-Aviv University (as part of the ERC project TraffLab, headed by Prof. Hila Shamir). His practical experience includes leading positions in “Power to the Workers – Democratic Trade Union” and the Junior Academic Staff Union (at Ben-Gurion University) as well as an academic counselor to the General Trade Union Federation in Israel (“the General Histadrut”). 
Assaf‘s research interests are centered around the changing nature of class representation and its implications for labour regulation, democratic governance and economic growth; in particular he analyzes the transformations of workers’ representation and the relations between unions and non-union actors in the context of industrial relations’ liberalization. His work draws broadly on social sciences and political-economic theories. His PhD dissertation dealt with the transformations of coordinated class representation in Israel in the period of 1945-2015. 
At Safra, Assaf will work on the changing sources and trajectories of precarious workers’ representation in Israel, focusing on transformations in union strategies as part of their interactions with other actors of workers’ representation. Besides, he will develop a new project on the implications of “union revitalization” on macroeconomic ideas, policies and growth.

Erez Maggor received his Ph.D. in Sociology from NYU (2020) and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, at Tel-Aviv University (2020-2021). His broad interests include political economy, political sociology, sociology of development, industrial and innovation policy, and comparative-historical sociology. His research has appeared in Socio-Economic Review, Politics & Society, and Israeli Sociology. He is also the co-editor of a book (Indiana University Press, 2017) and a special issue of Theory & Criticism, both on the topic of the Israeli settlement project.

Erez’s dissertation Politics of Innovation: The Entrepreneurial State and the Making of Israel’s ‘Start-Up Nation’, is a state-led account of Israel’s transformation from traditional manufacturing to an innovation and knowledge-based economy. The dissertation analyzes Israel’s emergence as a global leader in cutting-edge innovation technologies, often described as a market-driven process led by risk-taking entrepreneurs, as a highly contentious political project. Rather than the invisible hand of market forces, his work underscores the crucial role of industrial policy and the collaboration between private and public actors.

His second ongoing research project investigates the relationship between the retreat of the welfare state under neoliberalism and territorial state-expansion, focusing primarily of the historical case-study of Israel's settlement project. While most accounts view the settlements as a grassroots theological or ethno-national phenomenon, his research considers how an array of conventionally downplayed structural factors associated with the neoliberal turn – changes in urban and regional planning, rising inequality, welfare retrenchment, and the changing political economy of industry and employment – played a crucial, yet underappreciated role in determining the ongoing expansion of Israel's settlement project.

As a postdoctoral fellow at the Safra Center, Erez will expand the comparative dimension of his dissertation research, examining state-led innovation beyond Israel in places like Taiwan, Korea and Ireland. He will also begin work on a new research project focusing on Israel’s “Digital Health Initiative”, a new government program that advances ‘digital health’ as a new engine of economic growth, and addresses a host of social-health related challenges that have only become more pressing in the context of the Covid-19 epidemic.

Idit Ben Or is a social, cultural and economic historian. Her current research focuses on the history of non-governmental currencies in the Early modern world (17th-19th centuries). Idit's dissertation, completed at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explored non-governmental coinage that circulated in local economies in England. Her current project focuses on the history of corporate issued money, analyzing coinage of the English East India company. 

For her doctoral work Idit was the recipient of the Azrieli Fellowship, the George L. Mosse Fellowship and the Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center Graduate Fellowship.

Marc Goetzmann holds a PhD in philosophy of law and social sciences from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, now the University Côte d'Azur. Before that, he obtained the French agrégation de philosophie, after an MA (2014) and a BA (2012) in philosophy at the University of Paris 1-Sorbonne, both summa cum laude. His research generally focuses on the commons, ownership structures and customary law, as well as the relationships between these different topics. These themes can be found in his thesis, defended in 2019 and entitled In the Shadow of the Leviathan: Custom and Property as a ‘Bundle of Rights’ from Henry Sumner Maine to Elinor Ostrom. It analyzes how late 19th-century British thinkers, such as John Stuart Mill or Henry Sumner Maine, proposed an alternative conceptualization of the relationship between law and custom, in light of the colonization of India and the study of the so-called "village communities," now called the "commons”. This research was extended to study the history of the concept of property as a "bundle of rights" and to investigate Elinor Ostrom’s depiction of customary systems. Today, two ambitions motivate his research: understanding how normative systems can be set up locally on the one hand, and to show that the property structures thus constructed can combine individual ownership and market relations on the other hand, thus offering a response to critics of "commodification". During his stay at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at the University of Tel Aviv, he will explore examples of patrimonialization as an alternative structure of property-relations to individual property as dominion. His main goal will be to find a diverse set of examples that illustrate how social groups decide to regulate the effect of markets on their territory.  This will be a way to test the idea that social groups do not reject markets but try to both find a balance between the current interests of their individual members and the management of negative and positive externalities problems caused by markets.

Mirthe Jiwa will join the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics as a post-doctoral fellow in the Fall of 2020. Prior to joining the Safra Center for Ethics, Mirthe did her PhD at the Amsterdam Centre for Transformative Private Law (previously called Centre for the Study of European Contract Law) at the University of Amsterdam. She obtained her bachelor degrees in philosophy (BA) and law (LL.B) from the University of Amsterdam. Subsequently, she studied international criminal law at Columbia Law School and Amsterdam Law School as well as (domestic) criminal law (LL.M), (domestic) private law (LL.M), and philosophy (MA) at the University of Amsterdam.
Mirthe is interested in private law and its theory and has a special interest in critical theory and literary criticism. Her doctoral dissertation grappled with the question of how contract law allocates contractual recognisability differentially, thereby rendering some subjects more vulnerable to injury, legal disenfranchisement and failing social and economic networks of support, whilst others appear as more valuable and more ‘worthy’ of contractual protection and recognition.
During her time as a post-doctoral researcher at Safra Center for Ethics, Mirthe will engage with the more ethical dimension that remained underexplored in her dissertation. Her post-doctoral research project explores the possibility – and the potential difficulties and points of friction – of rethinking contractual relations as being based on an ethics of radical relationality. The research project is situated at the intersection of moral and political philosophy and contract law theory, and adopts a trans-disciplinary approach accordingly

Stanislas Richard works in political philosophy. His clinical expertise concerns the broadly understood concept of work and labour, with all the adjacent normative questions that concern it, such as exploitation, just wages, workers' rights, and labour - capital relations. He has a broader research interest in the philosophy of economic, in business ethics and in left libertarianism and has published on these topics in the Review of Social Economy and in Contemporary Political Theory.

Before joining the Safra Center, he held various visiting positions and lectureships at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, the Jagiellonian University, the University of Manchester, the University of Yangon and UC San Diego. His PhD is from Central European University. 

Stan was born in Paris and has French and Polish dual citizenship. In his free time, he mostly dances and plays chess.

Yair Kaldor is a historical sociologist and political economist interested in questions of class, power, culture, and politics. Kaldor has completed his PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation examined the impact of financialization on income inequality in the U.S. economy from a class perspective, showing how rising level of corporate debt helped undermined the power of organized labor in the early 1980s. Kaldor holds a BA in history and philosophy from Tel Aviv University (magna cum laude), and an MA from the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas (summa cum laude).

At the Safra Center, Kaldor will continue his research into the political economy of financialization and its impact on the social structure of capitalist economies. His project aims to open the “black-box” of financial securities to examine the social relations, property rights and institutional presuppositions that are encapsulated in these contractual obligations. The project includes a historical-institutional analysis of securities laws and regulations in recent decades, with the goal of clearly, and a value-chain analysis of financial securities.

Alongside his academic work, Kaldor has also written on economic issues for various Israeli newspapers, including TheMarker (Haaretz), Calcalist (Yedioth Ahronoth) and Maariv.

I am a PhD candidate at the School of Political Science, Government and International Affairs at the Tel Aviv University. My research focuses on public attitudes towards governmental paternalistic interventions and nudges. I explore to what extent and under what circumstances are people willing to accept government paternalism, and prefer it over less coercive interventions, known as nudges. I investigate these questions experimentally, having designed and carried out a conjoint online experiment. I am also a member of the Israel National Election Study (INES) research group, looking into Israeli voter behavior and particularly into patterns of representation as part of an ISF Center of Excellence. I hold a B.A. in philosophy and Middle Eastern History (Summa Cum Laude) from the University of Haifa, and an M.A. in Political Science (Magna Cum Laude) from Tel Aviv University. My non-academic experience includes over ten years of research in the civil service, as an officer in the Israeli Defense Intelligence and as a strategic planner at the Ministry of Public Security. 

Dana Shem-Ur is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Tel-Aviv University.  She holds a MA summa cum laude in contemporary philosophy from École Normale Supérieure, Ulm, and a BA summa cum laude in history from Tel-Aviv University.  Her doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of Prof. Michael Zakim, explores American business history through an interdisciplinary approach.  More precisely, it focuses on the rise of a managerial class as an evolution of various “personas”, both in terms of public image as well as the production of a business “self.” Generally, Dana's research interests embrace the history of the economy, critical theory, political sociology, and political philosophy. 

Prior to joining Safra, Dana received several scholarships:  an excellency grant from the Center for the study of the United States in partnership with the Fulbright program (2020); contractual professor assistantship in ethics at the University of Geneva (2017-2018); and a Chateaubriand award for excellence in humanities and social sciences from the French embassy in Israel (2015-2016). Dana is also an autodidactic polyglot, having mastered eight languages including Chinese, Russian, French, Italian, German, and Greek.

Shiran Altman-Battler is a Ph.D. candidate in Law at Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies at Tel Aviv University. Her dissertation, titled “Plea Bargaining in International Criminal Law and in International Criminal Tribunals”, is supervised by Prof. Talia Fisher and Prof. Leora Bilsky. Her research seeks to examine the historical origins and the evolution of plea bargaining as a legal institution in international criminal law, as well as its normative and moral aspects and implications.