On Sunday, May 11 at 10 am Eastern Time, Bernard Avishai will be speaking with us for a Casual Conversation. (The earlier time is necessitated by our guest speaking with us from Jerusalem. It cannot and will not be changed.) Visiting Professor Avishai was recommended to classmate Bruce Alpert, Chair of the Jewish Culture Group, by Dartmouth Jewish Studies Professor Susannah Heschel, who was a guest at a prior Casual Conversation.
Here is Professor Avishai’s short bio:
Bernard Avishai is Visiting Professor at Dartmouth during the summer and fall quarters. A Guggenheim fellow, he is the author of four books, three on Israeli politics and the Middle East, and writes for The New Yorker online. He was Adjunct Professor of Business at the Hebrew University and taught at MIT in the 1980s and Duke in the 2000s. He is a past technology and strategy editor of Harvard Business Review and, among other management positions, the former International Director of Intellectual Capital at KPMG. His case study, Motorola in China, was published by Motorola University. He has written about global business, public policy, and Middle East affairs, for Inc., The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and many other publications.
From his blog, Bernard Avishai Dot Com :
For the past two years, at Dartmouth College, I have been co-teaching a course called The Politics of Israel and Palestine with Ezzedine Fishere, a former Egyptian diplomat who served under the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. Our work in the class—a civil, exploratory dialogue sustained over eighteen sessions—anchored a series of public forums at the college in the aftermath of the horrors of October 7th. These drew several hundred students and faculty into the college halls, and were watched by two thousand more online; they proved sufficiently helpful in preëmpting the polarization that has afflicted other Ivy League campuses to gain the attention of various national media. I spend half the year in Israel, and have since returned to a country at war. I’ve been thinking more about our miniature peace process, about how a university might organize for difficult subjects—and about what, after all, universities are.
Professor Avishai would like to focus “on what’s ahead, after the Gaza War,” which is the topic he deals with in his March 28, 2025 essay in The New Yorker: “Why Benjamin Netanyahu Is Going Back to War: The public’s fears for the fate of the ceasefire and the hostages have become a struggle over the rule of law.”
Please let me know if you plan to attend by emailing me at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com by the end of the day on the Friday prior to the Casual Conversation, to wit, May 9.
I hope to see many of you soon.
Arthur Fergenson
P.S. If you cannot find the The New Yorker essay on line or in your local library, AND you are absolutely committed to attending the Casual Conversation, please let me know.