Dr. Amy Weinreb is the Director of Education and Talent Hub at Masa and Interim Team Lead at the Masa Leadership and Impact Center. She specializes in curriculum design and professional development, emphasizing inclusive, student-centered, and active learning. After 13 years at the University of Texas at Austin as an Associate Professor of Instruction, she is now a lecturer at NYU Tel Aviv and The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, where she delivers intensive anthropology courses to students from around the globe. In her teaching, research, and writing, she uses ethnographic observation to consider complex questions. Her publications have focused on themes of citizen-state relationships, emotions in cultural context, and differences between public perception vs. the lived experience.
Our Voice of the Fortnight is from the Times of Israel's 'Wartime Diaries' podcast. In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, Shai Davidai – an Assistant Professor at Columbia University – became an unlikely public defender of Israel. And truthfully, even he was surprised by this turn of events: As a committed left-wing Israeli, he had spent years criticizing the government, and often took to the streets to demonstrate against its policies. But the atmosphere he witnessed on college campuses (and specifically on his own campus at Columbia), compelled him to speak up and speak out.