My research and teaching explore how ideologies, political frameworks, religious traditions, and cultural practices move across borders, shaping national narratives, transnational identities, and patterns of cooperation and conflict between Israel, the U.S., and states across the Middle East an North Africa. Through my publications, ongoing research projects, public scholarship, and teaching, I examine the ideational and material forces that have shaped modern Jewish national identity, institutions, and culture, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, and the evolving dynamics of the Arab–Israeli peace process.
I earned my PhD from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, my MA in Middle Eastern history from Tel Aviv University, and my BA in Middle East studies and political economy from The Evergreen State College. From 2012 to 2020—alongside my doctoral studies—I served as the Senior Academic Research
Coordinator at Emory University’s Institute for the Study of Modern Israel (ISMI), where I advanced ISMI's research and publication agenda, worked as a teaching assistant for undergraduate courses, developed public-facing programs in Jewish and Israel Studies, and directed the Institute’s undergraduate research internship program. I also taught in Emory University’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies as a Guest Professor for two semesters in 2019. From 2020 to 2022, I served as a Postdoctoral Associate in Duke University’s Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Center for Jewish Studies, where i conducted research and taught undergraduate courses on modern Israel, Zionism, and global Jewish cultures.
Since 2022, I have served as the Israel Institute Teaching Fellow in the Department of International Affairs and Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia, where I teach courses on modern Israel, the modern Middle East and North Africa, Jewish cultural, religious, and national identities, and cultural politics of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. I am the author of numerous academic articles about Israel and the Middle East, as well as the book, Singing the Land: Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America (University of Michigan Press, 2024). Singing the Land explores how Hebrew national music culture shaped American Jewish understandings of, and relationships with, the Zionist movement in Palestine prior to Israeli statehood in 1948.