Institute Staff
Prof. Julie Cooper
Director
Julie E. Cooper is Senior Lecturer (US equivalent: Associate Professor) in the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University. She works at the intersection of political theory and Jewish studies. Her research interests include the history of political theory; early modern political theory (especially Hobbes and Spinoza); Jewish politics; Jewish political thought; and modern Jewish thought. She is the author of Secular Powers: Humility in Modern Political Thought (Chicago, 2013) and the co-editor (with Samuel H. Brody) of The King is in the Field: Essays in Modern Jewish Political Thought (UPenn, 2023). She has been awarded fellowships from the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study and The Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. She is currently working on a book project which traces the intellectual genealogy of “autonomist" thinking within modern Jewish nationalism, from Simon Dubnow to contemporary Israel. The book aims to revive traditions of diasporic political thought which present the analysis of state structures as the crucial task for Jewish politics — even while they challenge the state’s exclusive sovereignty.
Julija Levin
Administrative Director
Julija Levin is a PhD student in Jewish History at the School of Jewish Studies and Archeology at Tel Aviv University. She has a BA degree in Hebrew and Jewish Studies from University College London, an MA degree in Jewish History from Tel Aviv University. Her MA thesis, titled "Violence Against Jewish Women in Vilna and the Vilna Gubernia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century: Gender, Vulnerability, and Agency" received an exceptional grade and reviews. Julija is also a three-time fellow of the Israeli Inter-University Program in Russian and East European Studies, and a recipient of research and travel grants from The Institute for the History of Polish Jewry and Israel-Poland Relations, and the Leonid Nevzlin Center for Russian and East European Jewry. Julija is writing her PhD dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Scott Ury on gender and mental health in the Jewish communities of the Northwestern parts of the Russian Empire.
