Leadership
Ken Stein
From January 1977 until December 2022, when he became an Emeritus Professor, Ken Stein had taught Middle Eastern History, Political Science, and Israel Studies to more than 5800 students over 44 years. Presently he is the Founding President of the Center for Israel Education (CIE) and its Chief Content Officer. At Emory University in 1998, he established The Emory Institute for the Study of Modern Israel (ISMI), then the first permanent Institute or Center in the U.S. created exclusively for the study of modern Israel. Growing from the public outreach of ISMI in the early 2000s, which initiated Jewish educator seminars and curriculum writing, he founded CIE in 2008, to focus exclusively on educational enrichment for Jewish educators, rabbis, non-Jewish clergy, students, and young adults. The CIE website began in December 2015 with 500 users that month; in the last week of September 2023, there were 50,000 users to the website, with more than 15% of its users were Spanish readers.
Ken is the author of five books, numerous papers and more than three dozen scholarly articles. In the 1980s, he inaugurated engaging undergraduate student internship programs as Middle East Fellow of the Carter Center, at ISMI, and at the CIE. His scholarly expertise focuses on the origins of modern Israel, the conflict’s evolution, Palestinian history, the Arab Israeli negotiating process, U.S.-Israeli relations and Israel education in college and precollegiate settings. Two of his books, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917- 1939 (1984) and Heroic Diplomacy: Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, Begin and the Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace (1999) have remained standard works in their fields. A third, The June 1967 War: How it Changed Jewish, Israeli, and Middle Eastern History (2017) was published for adult and teen audiences in conjunction with ARZA. At Emory he was the recipient of awards for teaching excellence, life-long mentoring of students and for internationalizing the curriculum. Ken’s fund-raising initiatives were responsible for bringing to Emory College sixteen visiting Israeli professors in the social sciences. As CIE's chief content author, he maintains strict scholarly integrity in teaching Israel through written and digital platforms.
Context, content, and perspective remain the cornerstones of excellence in Israel education. His leadership of CIE has enabled 3,500 Jewish educators and hundreds of thousands of Jewish students across North and South America so that they can deepen their knowledge of modern Israel. He continues to teach in all of CIE’s Israel learning initiatives. Ken was educated at Franklin and Marshall College (BA) and earned his advanced degrees from the University of Michigan (two MA degrees and a doctorate in Middle Eastern History). In the early 1970s, he was an advanced graduate student at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In Spring 2006, he was a visiting professor of Political Science at Brown University.
Dr. Tal Grinfas-David
Tal is the Vice President for Outreach and Pre-Collegiate School Management Initiatives at CIE. In July 2011, she became the Elementary School Principal of the Epstein School in Atlanta, GA. She earned her doctorate from Capella University in 2011 in curriculum and instruction, an M.Ed. in Educational Leadership and Administration from the University of Portland in 2006 with honors, a Bachelors of Education in the Advanced Teaching Certification Program focusing on English as second language at Beit Berl Teacher Education College, Kfar Saba, Israel from 1997-1999, and a B.A. from Boston University in 1995. In 2005, she came from the Portland Hebrew Academy to join the Emory Institute for the Study of Modern Israel as the senior curriculum designer. From 2005 to the present, she led and conducted the pedagogy portions of the ISMI/CIE one-week Israel Education Teacher Workshops.
Our Team
Dr. Scott Abramson
Scott Abramson is a historian of the modern Middle East and the senior research officer at CIE. He received his master's degree from Brandeis University's Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and his Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. He has held postdoctoral appointments at UCLA’s Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies and at Northwestern University's Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies. Dr. Abramson has designed and taught many courses on the history and culture of Israel and the Middle East to much acclaim, UCLA, for one, honoring him in 2018 with its highest accolade for instruction, the Distinguished Teaching Award. He has written many articles—their subjects spanning a diverse topical spread, from Iranian Jewry to Lebanese Armenians—for popular publications and in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. At CIE, he creates digital and curricular content for students of all ages and understandings. Scott is an integral teaching participant in CIE's teen, young adult, and adult education programs.
Dr. Michael Berger
Dr. Michael Berger is a CIE consultant and a lead presenter in CIE educator workshops pertaining to Judaism and the origins of Jewish nationhood. He is an Associate Professor of Jewish Law and Ethics in Emory University's Department of Religion, where he teaches courses in the history of Judaism, Jewish ethics, Rabbinic literature and modern Jewish thought. He received his BA with honors at Princeton, MA and doctoral degrees from Columbia. At Emory, his research and teaching focus on the development of Jewish law and ethics, issues of medieval and modern Jewish thought, and the formation of contemporary Jewish identity particularly among the ultra-Orthodox. For CIE, he has produced several highly respected digital items, Religion and State in Israel, The Haredim and the State of Israel, Religious Zionism, and The Origins of Jewish Nationhood.
Tiffany Borrego
Aaron Bregman
Dr. Noga Cohavi
Dr. Noga Cohavi resides in Haifa where she is an Israeli educator and key participant in the Jewish Peoplehood Program of the Israeli Ministry of Education. She writes teaching/learning units and guides teachers in professional development opportunities in the fields of Jewish and Israeli identity. She teaches in the Jewish Peoplehood Program at Haifa University and leads a world-wide steering committee, Avnei Bohan on Jewish and Israel education. Cohavi is the author of numerous works in Hebrew and English, representative of them is her “Move the Goalposts: A Proposal for a Didactic Discussion on Jewish Peoplehood,” 2020. Growing up in the Arava she received her advanced degrees from Haifa University, writing her dissertation on the perception of the Golain the Dialogue between Moshe Sharett and Nahum Goldmann. She participates in CIE programs as a thought leader in defining and acquiring Jewish and Israel education.