Hanna Herzog

Hanna Herzog is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Tel Aviv University. She is co-director and co-founder of WIPS – the Center for Advancement of Women in the Public Sphere at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

She specializes in political sociology, political communication, sociology of knowledge, generation as a sociological phenomenon, and sociology of gender. She has published extensively on the politics of ethnic and racial relations, women in politics and politics of women, Palestinian women citizens of Israel, Jewish women in the Holocaust, and gender, religion and politics. 

She believes in bridging between academic knowledge and public knowledge and activity.

As a scholar of Israeli society with special expertise in gender issues, she has been invited to serve on many national committees.

Among her activities, she served as:

• Board member of the Women’s Network from its inception until the end of the 1990s.
• Head of the Civil Society Umbrella at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and member of the Academic Committee (2002-2016)
• Board member of the Dafna Fund – the first and still the only feminist fund in Israel – from its inception in 2003 until 2013.
• National Security Council Committee for Evaluating National-Civic Service (2000-2001).
• National Commission for the Examination of the Structure of Government in Israel established by the President of Israel (2005-2007).
• She was a member of the IDF Commission for the Examination of Women’s Service (2007), known as the Segev Committee.
• Member of the Israel Prize committee on Sociology (2008)
• Member of the Advisory Committee of the Authority for the Advancement of Women (part of the Prime Minister’s Office) (2008-2015).
• Member of the Ministry of Finance Committee for Integration of a Gender Perspective in the State Budgetary Process (2013-2014).This program was adopted in accordance with Government Resolution 2084 dated July 10, 2014.
• The Center for the Advancement of Women in the Public Sphere (WIPS) was one of the leaders in gender mainstreaming and building a coalition of women’s organizations to write a comprehensive national operational program in compliance with UN Resolution 1325. See introductory video here.This program was  adopted by Tel Aviv Municipality on November 9, 2014 and, on December 14, 2014 by Government Resolution 2331 on gender equality and mainstreaming.
• Head of the team to establish the National Center for Gender Information initiated by the Ministry of Science beginning in 2016. Partners in this venture are WIPS, the Ne’eman Institute of the Technion, and the Workshop for Public Knowledge.
• Member of Advisory Forums of the IDF Chief of Staff, lectured in various frameworks for female officers, Member of the Forum for Advancing Gender Equality and Gender Mainstreaming, headed by the Chief of Staff’s advisor during 2014-2016.
• Member of the Council for the Advancement of Women in Academia, Technology and Education since 2017
• Chair of the academic sub-committee of the Council for the Advancement of Women in Academia, Technology and Education since 2018.
• Member of Mekomiyot 2018 – a project of a coalition of 25 organizations including WIPS whose aim was to ensure equitable gender representation in the 2018 local elections. In this context, Herzog promoted the idea of civil society organizations, in general, and of women’s organizations, in particular, in a campaign requiring guaranteed women’s representation, and ensuring that women would feature in first or second places on all party lists. The campaign called upon voters to support only those lists that met this requirement.
• Prof. Herzog gives many public lectures (largely free of charge), provides guidance to high school students, media interviews on topics related to her sociological fields of expertise, with particular emphasis on gender mainstreaming.