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Elie Rekhess

Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Crown Visiting Professor in Israel Studies
Director, Israel Innovation Project (IIP)
Visiting Professor in the Department of History
Israel Liaison, Office of the Vice President for International Relations

About

Areas of Focus

  • Middle Eastern history
  • Jewish studies
  • Israel studies

Work/Research

  • Arab minority in Israel
  • Jewish-Arab relations
  • Palestinian politics
  • Islamic resurgence in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza

Career

Rekhess is a leading historian of the contemporary Middle East, specializing in the study of the Arab minority in Israel and Islamic resurgence within the Palestinian society. He authored and edited over a dozen books related to his fields of interest. His most recent book was entitled: Muslim Minorities in Non-Muslim Majority States (Hebrew). He served as a Strategic Advisor to Prime Minister Ehud Barak and as an Advisor to the Ministerial Committee on the Arabs in Israel. Until his retirement in 2011, he taught in the department of Middle East History at Tel Aviv University. Rekhess served as a Senior Research Fellow in the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University, and headed the Program on Jewish-Arab Cooperation in Israel, sponsored by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (1995-2010).

Rekhess is the Director of the Israel Innovation Project (IIP) at Northwestern University. The IIP was established in 2020 to expand and develop academic ties between Northwestern and Israeli universities — with a special emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math. Rekhess also has held the position of Crown Visiting Professor in Israel Studies at Northwestern since 2013. He teaches in the Department of Jewish Studies as well as in the Department of History. In 2014, he established Israel Studies at the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies and was appointed associate director for Israel Studies, a position he held until August 2020. In 2021, he was appointed Israel Liaison in the Office of the Vice President for International Relations.