Sara Hirschhorn tackles the much-contested American settler movement. Over 60,000 Jewish-Americans have settled in the territories since 1967. Who are they, and why did they chose to leave America to live at the centre of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Dov Waxman examines the seismic shift in American-Jewry’s attitude towards Israel, which is more conflicted than ever before.

Sara Yael Hirschhorn is University Research Lecturer and Sidney Brichto Fellow in Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. Her research, teaching and public engagement activities focus on the Israeli settler movement, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Diaspora-Israel relations She is an international public speaker, writer, and consultant on Israeli/Jewish affairs, and her work appears regularly in the NYT, Haaretz, Le Monde, The Forward, the JC, Moment, USA Today, Al Jazeera, and the Times of Israel.

Dov Waxman is Professor of Political Science, International Affairs, and Israel Studies and the Stotsky Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies at Northeastern University. He is also the co-director of the university’s Middle East Center. His research focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israeli politics and society, US-Israel relations, and American Jewry’s relationship with Israel. He received his PhD and MA from Johns Hopkins University and his BA from Oxford University. He has previously taught at the City University of New York, Bowdoin College, and the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey; and he has been a visiting fellow at Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Oxford University. He has also worked as a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC. He is the author of The Pursuit of Peace and the Crisis of Israeli Identity.

Michael Goldfarb is an author, journalist and broadcaster. He currently presents the FRDH (First Rough Draft of History) podcast and makes radio documentaries for the BBC. He is an occasional contributor to The New York Times, Observer and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His most recent book is Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance.