About Us
The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Public Humanities at Tel Aviv University was established in October 2023, grounded in the understanding that the humanities are not only academic fields but also civic practices – ways of thinking and acting together in times of complexity and change.
The Center brings humanistic thinking into public life by cultivating practices such as attentive listening, interpretation, responsible dialogue, decision making and shared observation. Working in partnership with local authorities, schools, cultural institutions, archives, libraries, and civil society organizations, the Center develops collaborative frameworks through which humanistic knowledge becomes a salient resource for communities. The Center works with diverse publics to encourage constructive dialogue and to build partnerships across social, cultural, and institutional boundaries; transforming the public humanities into a reciprocal space in which scholarship and public life reshape one another.
What Do We Do?
Training Humanistic Community Leaders: Preparing educators, students, and community leaders to engage with complexity, ask precise questions, and make responsible decisions about our shared future, to bring humanistic thinking into community life.
Transforming Knowledge into Practice: Translating humanist values and methods into tools applicable in classrooms and community spaces. We work in partnership with local stakeholders, from a place of respect, mutual acknowledgment, and civic responsibility.
Action-Based Research: Expanding knowledge in the fields of pedagogy, public humanities, memory, and civic imagination. Just as the humanities have the power to shape the world, the encounter with the world has the potential to reshape humanistic thinking itself.
Our Programs
Motzaei Da’at – Research and Teaching of the Humanities
A community of researchers and educators that strives to promote humanistic learning for all students. Working with schools and other community-based partnerships, we examine and develop methodologies for education in times of trauma, and strengthen the skills needed to live productively in a society comprised of diverse languages and communities.
Meshivei Ruach – Humanities in the Community
A year-long track to train ambassadors for the humanities. Participants and alumni of the program include community leaders, cultural figures, and social entrepreneurs, carefully selected from across all walks of Israeli society. Returning to the community, they employ practices drawn from the humanities to promote initiatives that promote common sense, build trust, and foster partnerships.
Join Us
Researchers, educators, cultural activists, and community leaders – join us! Help explore how freedom, justice, responsibility, and a future based on mutual acknowledgment can be transformed into praxis. The Center is a place in which to learn, to build, and to reinvent the humanities as vibrant civic action at the core of life in Israel.
Our Management Team
Oded Lipschits, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities
Galia Patt-Shamir, Director of the Center
Adiel Portugali, Director of Meshivei Ruach
Ran Kalderon, Administrative Director
Hedy Cohen, Project Coordinator
