A key feature of Israeli life today is the lack of a broad social, political, intellectual, and experiential consensus on the proper vision for the state. Life amid controversy, though it has its positive side, can also be a dangerously destabilizing force.

Aharon Barak was born in Kovne (Kaunas), Lithuania in 1936. In 1958 he completed his master’s degree at the Faculty of Law of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and between 1960 and 1963 he served as a teaching assistant at the faculty. In 1963 Barak received his license to practice law, completed his doctorate studies cum laude at the Faculty of Law, and joined the staff at the faculty.

Dr. Haim Zicherman, a senior lecturer at the Ono Academic College (OAC), is an expert in constitutional and property law and also researches the ultra-Orthodox society.

Jehuda Reinharz returned to the directorship of the Tauber Institute in 2011, after serving as president of Brandeis University between 1994 and 2010. He continues to serve as general editor of the Tauber Institute publication series and as Richard Koret Professor of Modern Jewish History. In January 2011 he became president of the Mandel Foundation. Reinharz has authored and co-authored many articles and books, including, most recently, Glorious, Accursed Europe, Darwin and His Circle, and The Scientific God: Popular Science in Hebrew in Eastern Europe in the Second Half of the 19th Century (all three written with Yaacov Shavit). His forthcoming books include the third and final volume of his biography of Chaim Weizmann, as well as a book entitled The Road to September 1939: The Yishuv, the Jews of Poland and the Zionist Movement.