Fellows Academic Program

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Naama Goldberg is a legal scholar working in the intersection of law and moral philosophy. She is particularly interested in the moral emotions, as well as their place in basic moral responsibility, and in the legal realm of the modern liberal state. Her work starts from the premise that law and morality are meant for humans. This understanding has implications for the way her work theorizes and understands emotions, law, and morality, as well as the constraints on them.

Prior to joining the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Naama was a postdoctoral fellow at the Cheshin Center for Advanced Legal Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Naama holds a JSD and LLM in legal theory from the NYU School of Law, and an LLB from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she graduated with distinction. Before pursuing postgraduate legal studies, Naama clerked for Hon. Justice Isaac Amit at the Supreme court of Jerusalem, and was admitted to the Israeli Bar Association.

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Avital H. Levi received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Arizona. Her dissertation proposed an original theory of sentimentalist moral obligation. Her research centers on the intersection between meta-ethics, epistemology and normative ethics, and she is especially interested in the role of loyalty in ethics and political theory. In her current research Avital is arguing against the view that loyalty to the state requires moral prejudice, utilizing her view of loyalty as the motive to act on behalf of one's extended self. Avital holds an MA in philosophy from Ben Gurion University and a BA in philosophy from Princeton University, and she was a postdoctoral fellow at Tel Aviv's philosophy department. She lives in Jerusalem with her husband Eliyahu and their three children. 

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Fady Khoury is a legal researcher, focused on constitutional law and design in divided places. His dissertation, entitled The Constitution of Divided Societies: Power-Sharing, Multi-Level Governance and Courts, was recently completed and successfully defended at Harvard Law School. Khoury completed his LL.B. at Haifa University and his LL.M. at Harvard Law School.

In his research, Khoury pursues a comparative constitutional law project examining the dynamics and resolution of constitutional conflicts in three case-studies: Lebanon, Belgium and Northern Ireland. Identifying gaps and omissions in power-sharing theories, with a particular emphasis on consociationalism, Khoury explores three main themes: 1. The utility of sociological constitutional legitimacy as an analytical and diagnostic framework for understanding the nature and dynamics of conflicts in divided societies; 2. The utility of federalism and devolution in addressing (some) governance failures in post-conflict consociational systems; 3. The design, function and jurisprudential practices of apex courts in power-sharing systems.

As a postdoctoral fellow at the Safra Center, Khoury will expand on his doctoral research by developing a project exploring the constitutionalist conceptions undergirding power-sharing theories, design and systems of governance. Khoury’s academic interests are varied, but include the following fields: Constitutional Law and Design; Constitutionalism; Federalism; Democratic Erosion/Backsliding; Constitutional Sociology; Law and Society; Human Rights; Processes of Polarization and Pillarization, and more.

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Agata has just finished working on her doctoral thesis in law at the European University Institute in Florence. Prior to that she obtained a Master of Law Degree (LLM) in EU Law from the University of Amsterdam and a Bachelor Degree in Law (LLB) from the University of Lancaster. She is working on the intersection of political philosophy and law. Her doctoral thesis dealt with the application of deliberative democracy theory to the mechanism of European Citizens’ Initiative. Her research interests include: democratic theory; deliberative democracy; democratic innovation; civic participation; rule of law and EU constitutional law. At Safra she will work on the question of how to activate the deliberative potential of citizens, when it is trapped between technocracy and populism.  

* Agata is the winner of the Harry Bloomfield Postdoctoral matching scholarship and  the Parasol Foundation International Post-Doctoral Scholarship at the Tel Aviv University.

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Roey received his doctoral degree from the political science department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His dissertation examined the conceptual relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism in Kant’s political thought and argued that it should be understood within the wider context of Kant’s philosophical anthropology. At the Safra center he will expand his dissertation into a comparative study that, besides Kant, will examine these themes in the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder and Georg Forster.
In addition to the political and anthropological thought of the German Enlightenment, his other interests include theories of nationalism and modernity, as well as the social philosophy of Ernest Gellner. Roey is also an associate member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Enlightenment Studies (IZEA), at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, where he previously held a DAAD Research Grant for Doctoral Candidates.
 

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Elad Schlesinger studies Jewish and European history, Jewish law, and rabbinic cultures. His interests include the intellectual, cultural, and social history of European societies in the autumn of the Middle Ages and the (early) modern times, the history of law in its social and cultural contexts, the history of knowledge and the book, and legal theory in a historical perspective.

Elad completed his BA (philosophy) and MA (Jewish History and the MA honors program at the Mandel School in Humanities) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His doctoral dissertation, written in the Department of Jewish Thought at Ben Gurion University, deals with the themes of halakhic disagreement, legal deciding, and canonization in early modern European Jewish cultures, through the prisms of the formation of “decision rules” as a literary and paradigmatic phenomenon, the “mechanization” of the “rule” and the legal process, the legal decision procedure in its social and professional context, textual canonization, and the geographic space. Using methods of intellectual and social history and the history of knowledge, and close reading and analysis of rabbinic texts, he demonstrates how these intertwined themes affect each other and fundamentally change primary concepts in the Jewish and halakhic discourses from the medieval times to the modern era. At the Safra Center, he intends to research Jewish self-governance and judicial autonomy in late medieval and modern Europe, specifically regarding spatial and local law perceptions. By analyzing several principal questions and some case studies in this arena, he will seek to describe and define patterns that may contribute to a richer and more complex discourse on democracy, particularly regarding the concepts of deliberative democracy and civic participation.

Or Asher is a doctoral candidate in the direct-track PhD program in the Political Science Department at Tel Aviv University. His research concerns the intersection between politics and law, with a particular focus on comparative constitution making. In his dissertation, Or develops a theoretical model of the role civil society organizations (CSOs) play in constitution-making processes. Specifically, he focuses on questions such as how CSOs seek to elevate specific issues to the realm of constitutional politics, what dictates CSOs’ behavior in constitutional processes, and what explains the impact CSOs exert on the content of constitutions.

In previous research, Or investigated how the Israeli conservative movement emerged due to a deliberate and active effort by Israeli activists and Jewish-American philanthropists closely affiliated with the American conservative Right. Manifested in the establishment of an organizational platform, this effort seeks to propagate conservatism as the go-to ideology of the Israeli Right.

His broad research interests include comparative constitution-making, civil society, comparative politics, qualitative methods, and Israeli politics.

Regev Ben-David is a researcher of Zionist Thought and Jewish Culture. As a PhD candidate at the department of Jewish Philosophy at TAU (supervised by Prof. Ron Margolin), Regev studies the interpretation and integration of traditional Jewish elements into modern, secular, Israeli culture. His research focuses on the works of Berl Katznelson, one of Israel's Labor Movement's central spiritual and political leaders. Through this prism, Regev discusses critically several post-secular critiques of modernity, which provide intellectual support for modern religious conterrevolutions in liberal nation states.

In recent Regev was part of several think tanks and policy research groups, including with Prof. Ruth Gavison at Metzilah, at the Hartman Institute, and at Pnima. Through his work as lecturer and facilitator of group processes, he encounters diverse Israeli audiences. He holds a dual B.A. from the Hebrew University's Amirim interdisciplinary Honors program and Psychology (magna cum laude), and an M.A. from Bar-Ilan in Political Science (magna cum laude), where his Master's thesis focused on hybrid Jewish Identities in contemporary Israel. Regev is married to Sygall and is a proud father to three.

Mary Haddad is a PhD Candidate at the Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies at Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law. Her research interests include theory and history of international law. In her PhD, supervised by Prof. Assaf Likhovski and Dr. Doreen Lustig, Mary explores Egyptian legal imaginations of international law between 1882-1956. In addition, Mary teaches a course on legal reading and writing to 1L students. Alongside her legal studies, Mary is currently serving as a Council Member at the local municipality of her hometown – Jish. 

Benjamin Newman is a PhD candidate at the Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies at Tel Aviv University. His research thesis, to be written under the supervision of Prof. Talia Fisher, focuses on the normative values of the adversarial character of the criminal procedure, with the title “The Liberal Tension of Criminal Adversarialism”.

Benjamin has obtained an LL.B. degree in a combined program of Law and philosophy from the Hebrew University, an MA degree in philosophy (Summa Cum Laude) from Tel-Aviv University, and an LL.M. degree from the University of Cambridge, UK. More importantly, he has more than six years of practice as a legal advocate in criminal law, representing detainees, defendants and prisoners on behalf of Israel’s public defence system. His research tries to reconcile the theoretical aspects of the legal system and the legal practice; recently published a paper on coercion and the plea-bargaining practice (Criminal Law, Philosophy, 2023).