About

Born in the Washington, D.C., I emigrated to Jerusalem in the 1980s and moved to Mitzpe Ramon in the 2000s.

 

I am a cultural anthropologist and a research fellow in The Zinman Institute of Archaeology, the University of Haifa. I am also a founding member and lead taster of the Kerem Ramon Wine Collective, the largest vineyard in the Negev.

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I received a BA (1995) in General Studies from the Faculties of Humanities and Arts, Tel-Aviv University. My MA (2006) and PHD (2010) are from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology (née, Behavioral Sciences), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. My thesis and dissertation examined the paradoxical function that trance-dance music and culture serve for diverse secular and religious Israeli youth. Subsequently, I was a post-doctoral affiliate with the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at Ben-Gurion University where I performed anthro-linguistic research while examining the idiosyncrasies of Hebrew spoken in southern Israel. 

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Applying my training to conduct ethnographic studies among an array of communities in the peripheral Negev, between 2012-2019, I worked as a research fellow at the Dead Sea and Arava Science Center, an academic institute that is under the joint auspices of the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology and Ben-Gurion University. From 2019-2021, I was as a research fellow in the Department of Geography, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem where I conducted multidisciplinary research on disaster preparation, response and recovery in the context of earthquakes and the small-medium business sector and Covid-19 and the Israeli tourism sector.

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