13th Annual Shira Herzog Symposium

13th Annual Shira Herzog Symposium: Celebrating Defiance

Sunday, October 15th at 4 PM Eastern / 1 PM Pacific
In-person registration for this event is now closed and unregistered individuals will not be admitted by security to the event. Please join us online by registering for virtual attendance below.

UPDATE:

When we first invited you to our Shira Herzog Symposium this coming Sunday, we originally planned to talk about the democratic crisis in Israel.

Instead, the enormity of this week’s tragedies is now first and foremost in our minds.

We feel gathering at this time is newly important – and so our Symposium will continue with a new focus. We invite you still to gather with us and other progressive supporters of Israel to comfort each other, to grieve, and to hear how civil society is responding in this moment.

Last week, Israeli civil society leaders, activists, and NGOs from all walks of Israeli life were defending their rights and equality from the judicial overhaul. This week, those same Israelis are now supporting the most vulnerable populations in the south and working hard to prevent another outbreak of Jewish-Arab violence like we saw inside Israel in May 2021.

In the coming weeks, those same incredible Israelis will begin piecing Israeli society back together and fighting this endless cycle of violence.

We invite you this Sunday to still “celebrate defiance” – defiance against terror and extremism of all kinds, and refusing to give up hope and to allow violence to drive Jews and Arabs further apart.

Advance registration required,

Co-presented by ARZA Canada, Canadian Friends of Peace Now, and JSpaceCanada.

Our speakers:

Orly Erez-Likhovski holds a bachelor’s degree in law from Tel Aviv University. After interning in the Supreme Court, she got a master’s degree in law with a focus on human rights law at Columbia University in New York. Orly is a member of the Bar Association in Israel and New York. Orly has served as an attorney at IRAC since 2004, as Director of the Legal Department from 2014-2021, and Director of IRAC since 2021. Orly has brought about significant legal achievements such as making gender segregation on public transportation illegal, ending the Orthodox monopoly on state-funded salaries to rabbis, filing (and winning) the first ever class action suit regarding exclusion of women, and disqualifying racist candidates from running to Israel’s parliament.

Eran Nissan is an Israeli peace activist. Prior to joining Mehazkim, Eran headed the Education and Advocacy Department at ‘Peace Now’. Eran holds a B.A. in Political Science & Philosophy from the Ben-Gurion University and an M.A. in Emergency and Disaster Management from the Tel Aviv University. Eran is a certified dog trainer, and volunteers at Magen David-Adom as an EMT and an ambulance driver.

Amal Oraby is a Palestinian lawyer and human rights activist, and a member of the Board of Directors of Amnesty International Israel. Amal joined the New Israel Fund last year as the Director of Communications for Palestinian Society in Israel. Previously, Amal worked at Sikkuy-Aofuk in the Equality Policy Department. He has also worked at a private law firm in East Jerusalem specializing in planning and labour law. Amal is a prolific op-ed writer in Hebrew newspapers and records a legal human rights podcast on the Arab 48 website. Amal has an LLM degree from the University of Haifa and a master’s degree in urban planning from Hebrew University.

Andrew Cohen (Moderator) is a best-selling writer, an award-winning journalist and a professor of journalism, whom The New York Times calls one of “Canada’s most distinguished authors.” In a career of 45 years, he has written on politics and culture from Ottawa, Toronto, London, Washington and Berlin. His seven books of history, biography and commentary range in subjects from Canada’s constitutional politics to national character to Arctic exploration. He writes a weekly column for Postmedia News, appears regularly on radio and television, and is a consulting producer on a television documentary on John F. Kennedy airing in November. www.andrewzcohen.com