Dotan Greenvald

Dr. Dotan Greenvald is a Fellow with the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center. He received his Ph.D. in History from New York University, where he specialized in Jewish and Middle Eastern history. Greenvald’s research focuses on the development of nations through the lenses of political economy, social mobilization, and cultural reproduction.

His book project, Zionizing Zion: Nationalizing Commodities, Consumers, and Markets in Palestine, 1920–1940, examines the rise of “national” consumerism during the British Mandate and what its successes and failures reveal about the everyday limits of national influence in Israel and Palestine. Using a history-from-below framework, it explores the evolution of civil society and the political challenges it poses to the hegemonic nation-state, tracing this tension mainly through intercommunal relationships, the social reproduction of sovereignty, and the friction between ideology and the normative power of daily life. Greenvald has also written about the creation of legal culture in Israel and the use of mock public trials as a platform for popularizing legal debate. His current research turns to the city of Eilat as a case study in the remaking of the “frontier” in Israeli political and cultural thought.

At Harvard, Greenvald founded the Israel/Palestine Research Forum, a multi-year series convening scholars across the political and disciplinary spectrum. The Forum was supported by the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies, the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Harvard Intellectual Vitality Initiative. Greenvald also teaches courses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Zionism, the Israeli settlement project, and the history of Middle Eastern Jewry at Boston University's Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies.

Before his academic career, he co-founded Breaking the Silence, an organization of whistleblower veterans that uses first-hand soldiers’ testimonies on the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza to spark debate about the Israeli occupation, its costs, and the future of the region.