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- Alek D. Epstein, Ph.D. is affiliated with the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication, Open Univ... moreAlek D. Epstein, Ph.D. is affiliated with the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication, Open University of Israel. His professional experience includes courses taught at the Department of Sociology, Rothberg International School and Chais Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the School of Communication and Journalism at the College of Management, Tel-Aviv and a research project directed at the Shalem Center, Jerusalem. During the last eleven years (since 1999) he has been teaching as an adjunct professor of sociology of Israel at the Department of Jewish Studies, Institute of Asian and African Studies, Moscow State University. In 2009 he joined the faculty of the Russian-British postgraduate program at the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences.
As a former coordinator for academic cooperation at the Chais program in Jewish and Israel studies in Russian at the Open University of Israel, Alek D. Epstein pushed forward contacts with various top-ranked Russian universities. From 2006 till 2008 agreements were signed with the Moscow State University for International Relations (MGIMO); State University of Nizhniy Novgorod; Ural State University (Ekaterinburg); State University of Tomsk; Center of International Studies of Kazan State University, etc. Alek D. Epstein lectured in all of these universities; his articles were published in various journals and collections issued by each of the five abovementioned institutes of higher education.
Alek D. Epstein authored twelve books and more than 110 manuscripts in various scientific journals and collections published in 12 countries in 7 languages. An expert in Israeli history and politics, as well as in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Alek D. Epstein has written extensively on intellectuals' influence on the emergence of civil society, on the development of conscientious disobedience as an indicator of the changing patterns of civil-military relations, on the development of Israel studies as a research field in various countries, on the emergence of the Palestinian refugee problem and unsuccessful attempts to solve it, on various aspects of immigrant scientists’ and teachers’ professional and social integration in Israel, and on several additional topics.edit
The current research is based on two surveys conducted in 2011 and 2012 at nine youth camps organized for high school students’ education and recreation by the Jewish Agency for Israel in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova. Among the... more
The current research is based on two surveys conducted in 2011 and 2012 at nine youth camps organized for high school students’ education and recreation by the Jewish Agency for Israel in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova. Among the campers who responded to our survey, only a minority of 25.8% (2011 sample) and 37.5% (2012 sample) had not been previously involved in formal or informal Jewish educational frameworks, meaning that, on average, over two thirds of respondents have attended Jewish schools or clubs. However, the study has shown that most respondents had very limited knowledge of general Jewish and especially Israeli history: only under a quarter (24.7%) came up with three post-biblical names of historical Jewish figures. Recalling three meaningful names in the history of the State of Israel proved to be even more challenging for camp participants: nearly half of them could not recall a single name (47.6%), almost 30% recalled one or two, and only 22.8% stated three relevant names. Respondents also manifested poor familiarity with the history of Russian Jewry over the last two centuries, i.e. their own cultural heritage that apparently is not transferred from parents to children in their (usually ethnically-mixed) families.
