A Professor from Haifa, Israel, Visits IU South Bend

Daphna Sharfman, chair of the Political Science Studies of the Western Galilee College, Israel, will be at Indiana University South Bend from Sept. 3 through 11. The visit is also co-sponsored by the Jewish Federation of St. Joseph Valley. A reception for Sharfman will from 3:30 to 5 p.m. Tuesday, September 5, at the Jordan International Center, IU South Bend.

Sharfman will participate in a brown bag lunch and discussion from noon to 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 6 in Room 2170,Wiekamp Hall. Participants may bring their lunch. Drinks and desserts will be supplied.

The discussion is sponsored by Women’s Studies, International Programs and the South Bend American Association of University Women.

Sharfman is the author of four books on human and civil rights in Israel. She has also written on women in Israel. In addition to her teaching and research, Sharfman has been active as a member of U.N. delegations and international congresses concerned with human rights, women, and Israeli-Palestinian relations. For example, she was a member of the Israeli delegation to the U.N. World Conference on Human Rights in 1993; she participated in the Israeli-Palestinian Women Seminar on Peace, Women, and Human Rights in Oslo, Norway, in 1994; she was a member of the Israeli delegation to the U.N. General Assembly in 1994-1995. In 2000, she was engaged in an Egyptian lecture tour on Israel’s human rights.

A resident of Haifa, she has also has been exposed to an immediate experience of the recent conflict and will give her perspective of the situation.

Sharfman will speak to classes at IU South Bend, give a presentation at the Jewish Federation, and meet with interested faculty and students from throughout the Michiana area at several luncheons and talks. With the help of a grant from the Office of International Programs in Bloomington., IU South Bend is working on an exchange affiliation with Western Galilee College.

In the spring of 2007, Rebecca Torstrick, a professor in the department of Sociology and Anthropology at IU South Bend, will visit Western Galilee College.

In 2003-04 Torstrick had been awarded a Fulbright Lecturing/Teaching Award at Ben Gurion University in Israel. She earlier did fieldwork in the city of Acre, where Western Galilee College is located, which resulted in her book The Limits of Coexistence: Identity Politics in Israel, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2000.

For more information contact

Gabrielle Robinson, Director of International Programs, IU South Bend, 520-4429

Rebecca Torstrick, Director of Women’s Studies, IU South Bend, 520-5534