Prof. Yehouda Shenhav

The Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Yehouda Shenhav (Ph.D Stanford University 1985) is a Professor of Sociology at Tel-Aviv University. His main areas are social theory, sociology of knowledge, management and bureaucracies, ethnicity, race and the political sociology of sovereignty.

Previously held positions

  • Editor of Theory & Criticism (2000-2010), an academic and intellectual journal which leads critical theory in Israel.
  • Head of Advanced Studies at the Vanleer Jerusalem Institute (2005-2010).
  • Senior editor for Organization Studies (2004-2010).
  • Editor of Theory & Criticism in Context [Hebrew] which publishes original critical views on culture, society and knowledge in Israel (2003-to current).
  • Head of Horowitz Institute for Social Research (2003-2005).
  • Chair of Sociology and Anthropology department at Tel Aviv University (1995-1998).
  • Visiting Professor at: Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Iowa, and Madison-Wisconsin.

Main works:

— His main work in the area of history of management was published in Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering Foundations of the Managerial Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1999).

— His main work in the area of nationalism, ethnicity and religion was published in The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Ethnicity and Religion (Stanford University Press, 2006).

— His views on the Israeli-Palestinian war are published in Beyond the Two States Solution: A Jewish Political Essay (Polity Press, 2012).

Teaching:

Social theory, Society in Israel, Postcolonial Theory, Historical and Intellectual Origins of the Social Sciences, Sociology of Organizations, Sociology of Knowledge, Critical Theory.

Translations:

Translates novels from Arabic to Hebrew. Among them: Elias Khouri (White Faces; The Journey of Little Ghandi), Salman Natour (She, Me and the Autoumn; The Life and death of the Wrinkled Face’s Sheikh), Abd Elrahman Munif, and others.

Political and Social Activities:

Shenhav is a Jew of Arab origin (parents were born in Baghdad) and one of the founders of Ha’Keshet Ha’Demokratit Ha’Mizrahit (Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition, 1996), a social and political movement founded by second generation Israeli Jews from Arab countries.

He is also one of the founders of “Eretz Yoshveha” (A Country of its Inhabitants, 2010), an ex-parliamentary movement which calls for full citizenship and collective rights for all Jews and Palestinians in one shared space including redistribution of wealth.