Program for Jewish Civilization

Professor Yossi Shain is the Romulo Betancourt Professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv University where he is also the Head of the Aba Eban Program of Diplomacy, and Co-Chair of the MA Program in Political Leadership. At Georgetown University, he is a professor of Comparative Government and Diaspora Politics and the founding Director of the Program for Jewish Civilization. In 2007, he served pro-bono as President of the Western Galilee College.

Prof. Shain earned his B.A. (Philosophy) and M.A. (Political Science) degrees from Tel Aviv University (cum laude) and his Ph.D. (Political Science with distinction) from Yale University in 1988. Since 1989, he has taught Political Science at Tel Aviv University, where he served as Department Head from 1996 to 1999 and the Head of the Hartog School of Government from 2003 to 2007. From 2004 to 2008 he co-directed (with Peter Berkowitz) the Israel Program on Constitutional Government. He held many visiting appointments, including at Yale University, Wesleyan University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and Middlebury College. He was also a visiting senior fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, and senior visiting fellow at the Center for International Studies at Princeton University. He was recently invited to hold the Koret visiting professorship at the Hoover Institute and in the Spring of 2010 will be a visiting professor at the Science Po, Paris. Prior to his appointment as full professor at Georgetown University in 2002, Prof. Shain was the Aaron and Cecile Goldman visiting professor in the Department of Government from 1999 to 2002.

Outside the academy Prof. Shain has been involved in many projects and served on national and international committees related to security, international politics, the Jewish world, Diaspora, and migration policies. He also worked with various NGOs and governmental agencies (in Israel, the U.S., the U.K., Mexico, Armenia, and other countries). Shain also served three years as President of the Israeli Local Government Conference. Prof. Shain has won many scholarly awards, including the American Political Science Association Helen Dwight Reed Award for his work on exile politics, the International Fulbright Award, Israel’s Allong Fellowship for distinguished young scholars, and fellowshiphs from the French and German governments for his work on nationalism, ethnicity, and Diaspora politics.

He is the author of The Frontier of Loyalty: Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-State (1989; new edition Michigan University Press, 2005; Hebrew edition, 2006); Between States: Interim Governments and Democratic Transitions (with Juan J. Linz, Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Marketing the American Creed Abroad: Diasporas in the U.S. and Their Homelands (Cambridge University Press, 1999), which was awarded the 2000 Best Book of the Year Prize by the Israeli Political Science Association. His latest book is Kinship and Diasporas in International Affairs (Michigan University Press, 2007). Professor Shain also edited Governments-in-Exile in Contemporary World Politics (Routledge, 1991), and co-edited Democracy: The Challenges Ahead (with Aharon Kleiman, St. Martin’s, 1997) and Collective Memory in International Affairs (with Eric Langenbacher, Georgetown University Press, 2009).

Professor Shain is presently finishing a book provisionally entitled Moral Hazards: The Language of Corruption and Its Costs in Democracies (to be published simultaneously in Hebrew and English). In addition to his books, Professor Shain has published more than fifty academic articles in edited books and leading academic journals. He also contributed non-academic essays to newspapers and magazines – in Israel and the US – and provides commentaries on television and radio. He has been a regular guest on all major Israeli TV and radio channels, and has appeared on NBC, ABC, CNN, Fox News, CNBC, PBS, Al-Jazeera International, and The News Hour.