Please join Miami Beach JCC in Partnership with Americans for Ben Gurion University for an evening with Professor Ilan Troen.

Prof. Ilan Troen will share his firsthand account of Israel’s October 7 terrorist attacks when, sadly, his daughter and son-in-law were murdered. A historian of Israel and Jewish studies and resident of Beer-Sheva, Prof. Troen will give background on the kibbutz communities that were destroyed and talk about the importance of rebuilding Israel from the Negev.

ILAN TROEN

Ilan Troen is professor emeritus of the Sam and Anna Lopin Chair of Modern History (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) and of the Stoll Family Chair in Israel Studies (Brandeis University).

He has served as a founding dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, director of the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism in Sde Boqer, director of the Kreitman Foundation Fellowships, and on many key BGU committees between 1975-2007.  He presently represents BGU on the inter-university committee that combats BDS, and is an active writer and lecturer in this area internationally on behalf of Israel and its academy.

Troen has also served in various capacities in academic associations in Israel and abroad including president of the international Association of Israel Studies.  In 2023 he was awarded its Lifetime Achievement Award.

Invited by Brandeis to share BGU’s experience in developing the field of Israel Studies, he established the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies in 2007, the most extensive academic institute outside Israel.  Its Summer Institute alone has prepared 350 academics across the world to introduce or enhance Israel Studies at their institutions.

He has authored or edited numerous books in American, Jewish and Israeli history. He is the founding editor of Israel Studies (Indiana University Press), the leading journal in this new field to which more than 3,000 universities worldwide subscribe and 700 individuals contributed at least one essay.  He has authored or edited numerous books. Forthcoming in early 2024 is Israel/Palestine in World Religions; Whose Promised Land?

He has lectured widely at universities in China, Japan, Turkey, Australia, South Africa, across Europe (Bucharest to Oxford), Canada (McGill to Calgary) and the U.S. (Dartmouth to Berkeley).  He has also been scholar-in-residence in American Jewish communities.

Ilan Troen was born in Boston, educated at the Latin School, Hebrew College, Brandeis, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before taking his PhD at the University of Chicago.  He was at Missouri and Princeton before making aliyah in 1975.  He is married to Dr. Carol Troen who taught in BGU’s Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics.  They have six children, a growing number of grandchildren, and returned from Brandeis in 2017 to their permanent home in Omer/Beer-Sheva.