Yehouda Shenhav

Yehouda Shenhav was born in 1952 in Beersheba

Yehouda Shaharabani, later Shenhav, was born in Beersheba in 1952 to Jewish parents from Iraq. His father worked in intelligence. The family moved to Tel Aviv when he was 3 and to Petah Tikva when he was 10.

He earned a BA in sociology and labor studies from Tel Aviv University in 1977 and a master's in industrial management from the Technion. At Stanford University he received an MA in 1983 and a PhD in 1985, both in sociology.

Most of his academic work has been at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University, where he became a full professor in 2006 and headed the department from 1995 to 1998. He taught as a visiting professor at Wisconsin-Madison, Stanford, Princeton and Columbia. He has been a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute since 1999 and edited the journal Theory and Criticism from 2000 to 2010.

In 1996 he was among the founders of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition, which won a Supreme Court petition on the distribution of state lands. That year his Haaretz article on Mizrahi issues and the Israeli left drew wide public response. In 2014 he co-founded Maktoob, a circle and book series for translating Arabic literature into Hebrew.