Smadar Lavie

Smadar Lavie was born in 1955 in Jaffa

Smadar Lavie was born in Jaffa on 5 March 1955. Her father, Zalman Lavie, came from Lithuania in 1946, and her mother, Shoshana Gamliel, came from Yemen in 1929. The family moved to Holon, where she grew up and wrote for youth newspapers.

She served in the IDF as a guide in Central Command. She then worked for the Society for the Protection of Nature in Sinai and began fieldwork among the Bedouin of southern Sinai. She earned a BA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1980 and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989.

In 1990 she joined the University of California, Davis, and became an associate professor in 1994. Her work covers Egypt, Israel and Palestine, with a focus on race, gender and religion. Her books include The Poetics of Military Occupation (1990) and Wrapped in the Flag of Israel (2014).

In 1982 she co-founded CAFIOT, a Berkeley committee for academic freedom in the occupied territories. She later served on the board of Ahoti and co-directed the Coalition of Women for Mothers and Children from 2003 to 2006. She won the Gloria Anzaldúa Prize in 2009 and became a senior Fulbright scholar at Vilnius University in 2022.