Research
My research agenda is organized around two primary areas of inquiry. The first, which grows out of my doctoral work on Zionist national identity and the Jewish diaspora, examines how Hebraic national culture shaped American Jewry’s relationship with Israel and helped inform the broader U.S.–Israel relationship. This work has expanded to consider how cultural diplomacy more broadly influences transnational networks, political identities, and regional relationships, with particular attention to Israel, the United States, and states across the Middle East and North Africa. My second research program investigates Arab states’ changing engagement with Israel, the United States, and the Arab-Israeli peace process since the 1970s. This work provides an analytical framework for understanding both the persistent challenges and the emergent opportunities shaping contemporaneous regional diplomacy.
Dispora Jewry, Zionism, and Israeli National Culture
My first book, Singing the Land: Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America (University of Michigan Press, 2024), contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the origins of transnational Zionist identity among American Jews and its implications for the U.S.–Israel relationship. Described by renowned social scientist Edwin Seroussi as a “pioneering monograph [that] opens unexpected new vistas for the understanding of contemporary American Jewry during its critical formative stages in the period between the two World Wars,” the book explains how and why American Jewish identity, religious practice, communal institutions, and political behavior became increasingly enmeshed with support for Zionist national interests and institutions before Israeli statehood in 1948. These concerns inform my new article project, “The Sounds of Statehood: Israeli Music and Jewish-American Zionist Identity, 1948–1953,” as well as my next single-authored book project, Improvised Roots: Transnational Culture, Cold War Politics, and the Evolution of Israeli Jazz.
The Arab-Israeli Peace Process
My research on the Arab-Israeli peace process examines the domestic politics, identity-based norms, political motivations, and diplomatic engagements that have shaped Arab states’ evolving relationships with Israel. This work sheds light on shifting patterns of regional alignment and resistance, as well as on the ways Israel, Israelis, and new public presentations of Judaism have been integrated into parts of the Middle East and North Africa in recent years.
This research has yielded several article manuscripts and publications, including “Reviving Israeli-Palestinian Medical Collaboration for a Post-War Future” (Health Affairs Forefront, 2025), “Can Bilateralism Endure? The 2023–25 Gaza War and the Abraham Accords Framework” (Journal of Strategic Security, 2025), “Building Trust through Healthcare Diplomacy: A Literature Review and Case Study Analysis of the 2020 Abraham Accords between Israel and its Arab Neighbors,” and “From the Arab Peace Initiative to the Abraham Accords,” the latter two of which are currently under review. These concerns also serve as the basis for my new article project, “Between Normalization and Resistance: Israeli-Moroccan Relations.”