David Menashri

Professor (emeritus) David Menashri joined the Dayan Center (then the Shiloah Institute) in 1969. He is the Founding Director of the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies and a Senior Research Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University (TAU). He was chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History, Dean for Special Programs and the first Incumbent of the Nazarian Chair for Iranian Studies, all at TAU. Following his 2011 retirement from TAU, he served as President of the College of Law and Business in Ramat Gan, Israel. In 2016 and 2017 he was Visiting Israel Institute Professor at UCLA Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. He has been a visiting Fulbright scholar at Princeton and Cornell Universities. Among others, he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Yale, Oxford, Melbourne and Monash Universities (Australia), the universities of Munich and Mainz (Germany) and Waseda (Japan). In the late 1970s, Menashri spent two years conducting research and field studies in Iranian universities on the eve of the Islamic Revolution, with a grant from the Ford Foundation.

Outside academia, Prof. Menashri is active in numerous NGOs, in Israel and abroad. He is a member of the International Council of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (1995 Nobel Peace Prize) and chairman of the Israeli Pugwash Forum; Board Member of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East; Chairman of the Maccabim Foundation for Scholarships in Israel.  He was also Chairman of the International Sephardic Education Fund (ISEF) in Israel (1996-2006) and President of the Citizens' Empowerment Center in Israel (1996-2000).

Academic Research
Prof. Menashri’s main fields of academic research is religion, society and politics in modern Iran, Islamic Radicalism (with a focus on Shi’i Islam), Iranian-Israeli relations, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia and history of education in the Muslim world. His book on Iranian education has been published in 2018 in Persian translation.

Publications
Prof. Menashri authored and edited ten books, including: Post-Revolutionary Politics in Iran: Religion, Society and Power; Education and the Making of Modern Iran; Iran: A Decade of War and Revolution,” “Iran in Revolution” (Hebrew) and “Iran: Between Islam and the West” (Hebrew). He is also the editor of “Central Asia Meets the Middle East” and “The Iranian Revolution and the Muslim World.” He is the author of numerous articles on Iran and the Middle East. Between 1978 and 1999 he wrote all the 22 annual chapters on Iran in the Moshe Dayan Center's Middle East Contemporary Survey. He is currently completing a new book, entitled “Iran, Israel and the Changing Middle East.”