Bio
Bio
Sammy Smooha is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and President of the Israeli Sociological Society. He is a member of The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and a winner of the Israel Prize.
Prof. Smooha received his Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA and was appointed as a visiting professor in many universities, including University of Washington, University of Michigan, Brown University, UCLA, NYU and the University of London-SOAS. He served as a visiting senior fellow in various research centers, including the Frankel Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC.
Prof. Smooha specializes in ethnic relations generally and in Israel particularly, and studies contemporary Israeli society and democracy in comparative perspective. He has published widely on internal divisions and conflicts in Israel, focusing on Arab-Jewish relations and the ethnic divide among Jews. In 2003 he launched the research project "Index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel" that monitors attitudes of Arab and Jewish citizens toward each other and toward the state, drawing on representative opinion surveys taken annually. He developed the ethnic democracy model that is applied to Israel and other countries.
Among Smooha’s books are Israel: Pluralism and Conflict (University of California Press), Arabs and Jews in Israel (two volumes), The Fate of Ethnic Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (coedited with Priit Järve), Autonomy for Arabs in Israel? Still Playing by the Rules: Index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel (6 volumes).