EAST LANSING, Mich. – Yael Aronoff, a senior associate at Columbia University’s Institute of War and Peace Studies, has been named the first Michael and Elaine Serling and Friends Israel Studies Chair at Michigan State University.
The Serling chair is a core position in MSU’s Jewish Studies Program, which is administered by the College of Arts and Letters. Aronoff will become a faculty member in James Madison College, the university’s prestigious residential college in the area of public affairs. The appointment is effective Aug. 16.
Born in the United States and raised in Israel, Aronoff is completing a book titled “When Hardliners Opt for Peace,” a study of leadership and decision-making among six recent Israeli prime ministers. She is interested in Israeli politics and foreign policy, Israeli culture, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and modern Israel as a state and society in comparative perspective.
Following graduation from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1990, she worked with non-governmental organizations in the human rights and refugee fields. After receiving a master’s degree at Columbia, she worked for the Pentagon’s Office of Humanitarian and Refugee Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense during the Clinton administration and was assistant for regional humanitarian programs, representing the Office of the Department of Defense Rwanda Task Force.
She was a Javits Fellow from 1990 to1993 and a Columbia University President’s Fellow from 1995 to 2000. She received her doctorate in political science from Columbia in 2001. From 2001 to 2005, she was on the faculty of Hamilton College in upstate New York, where she taught courses on the United States and the Middle East, the negotiation of peace in the Middle East, and conflict and cooperation.
The Michael and Elaine Serling and Friends Israel Studies Chair was created through the generosity of donors committed to building MSU’s Jewish Studies Program, which focuses on the study of Jewish history, society and culture in the modern age in Europe, North America and Israel; on the study of the Hebrew language; and on study abroad.
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