Research Fellows
Prof. Rona Kaufman
An Associate Professor of Law at Duquesne University. She is a Zionist feminist, a teacher, and a scholar. Professor Kaufman teaches constitutional, employment discrimination, family, and gender law. She is developing a course on antisemitism and law. Her scholarship focuses on women, antisemitism, Jewish history, and law. Her work has appeared in the Florida International University Law Review, the Buffalo Law Review, the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, the Wisconsin Journal of Law, Gender & Society, and other academic publications.
Professor Kaufman serves on the Brandeis Center for Human Rights’ Center for Legal Innovation Advisory Board and on the Holocaust Claims Conference’s faculty working group for Holocaust education. She serves on the steering committee and is chairing the 2026 Law and Antisemitism Conference. She is also a member of Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s Voice of the People global cohort, a think tank focused on solving contemporary challenges facing the Jewish people. She is working on a book that explores Zionism, Israel, and antisemitism from a feminist perspective.
Dr. Alon Helled
Dr. Helled holds a PhD in Political and Social Change and is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Turin. His work focuses on Israeli politics, society, and history, as well as nationalism and international relations, with a special emphasis on Israel–Italy relations. Since 2021, he has also been part of the academic team of the specialization course on Holocaust education at the University of Florence.
His teaching and research are grounded in historical political sociology, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and Norbert Elias’s figurational analysis to study nationalism, collective memory, and political identity. He is an active member of SISP, ECPR, AIS, and EAIS. His publications include “Unstable Political ‘We’-Feeling in Italy and Israel: A Parable of Decivilization” (Quaderni di Sociologia, 2022) and the monograph Israel’s National Historiography: Between Generations, Identity, and Statehood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). His forthcoming book, Adapting Nations: National Resilience Between Contemporary Statehood and Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), co-authored with C. Pala and featuring an introduction by Siniša Malešević, examines how nations shape democratic institutions and legal structures in times of change and crisis.
Young Scholarship Recipients
Yonatan Matlub
Yonatan Matlub is a third-year law student at the Haim Striks Faculty of Law, College of Management. He is 27 years old and lives in Mevasseret Zion. During his studies, he has participated in a variety of academic projects, including the Banking Law Clinic and the “Global Commercial Excellence” program, where he researched constitutional issues with former Supreme Court Justice Eliezer Rivlin. These experiences strengthened his desire to contribute to the activities of the Center for Law and Antisemitism and to advance research and engagement on this important subject.
Gal Cohen
Gal Cohen is a third-year law student at the College of Management. He chose to study law out of a desire to understand the legal frameworks that shape human life in its various dimensions, with a particular interest in criminal law due to its direct impact on the state and its citizens. He is proud to be part of the activities of the Center for Law and Antisemitism, as a descendant of Holocaust survivors from Tunisia on his father’s side, and of a family that experienced the early stages of antisemitism in Iran on his mother’s side. He hopes the Center’s work will contribute to the struggle against this severe phenomenon.