This month, for the first time in four years, Israelis will go to the polls. Come to BZBI on Monday, October 19, to learn about that upcoming election: Israel’s parliamentary electoral system, the leaders and platforms of the principal parties, the most recent polling results, the prospects for forming a leadership coalition, and the historical context in which Israelis will be exercising their right to select their leaders.
Our speakers are two members of BZBI:
Dr. Shira Hebel Sela is a social psychologist and Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on political beliefs, conflict, polarization, and the psychology of how people understand and respond to political information. She completed her Ph.D. at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studied political and intergroup attitudes in Israel and other conflict settings. She now continues this work at Penn, examining how political beliefs are formed and changed. Originally from Israel, Shira recently moved to Philadelphia with her family, and her daughter, Alma, is in the Blue Room at the BZBI preschool.
The Honorable Ramy Djerassi joined BZBI in 1988 and was president from 1997-2001. A graduate of Yale College, Tulane Law School and Penn’s Fels Center of Government, he is a judge on Philadelphia’s Orphans’ Court. Ramy’s parents emigrated to Israel in 1948 from Bulgaria and then moved to the U.S where he was born in Boston in 1957. From 1964 through 1974, Ramy and family visited cousins and grandparents who lived in Jaffa and Tel Aviv. Ramy remembers pre-1967 Israel fondly and he tries to visit Israel at least once a year. He is a student of Israeli history and politics and he is co-chairing the Current Events and History subcommittee of BZBI’s Israel Engagement Committee.
