The Nordic Model: An Israeli Viewpoint

Benny Dagan has been serving as Ambassador of Israel to Denmark, since December 2017. Before arriving in Denmark, Mr. Dagan served for five years as Deputy General of the Foreign Ministry of Israel and Head of the Foreign Ministry’s Center for Political Research. As a member of Israel’s Foreign Service since 1985, Mr. Dagan has held various positions in political affairs, research, media and public relations in Israel as well as abroad. At the Foreign Ministry’s headquarters in Jerusalem, Mr. Dagan has held various positions in the Policy Research Center including Deputy Head of the Center and Head of the Middle East Affairs Bureau. He also served in the Western European Division and in the Press Department. Mr. Dagan postings abroad include: Political Officer at the Embassy of Israel in Cairo (1986-88); Consul in the Mid-West Region Consulate General of Israel in Chicago (1988-1990); Minister-Counselor of Middle-East Affairs at the Embassy of Israel in Washington, D.C (1998-2003) and Ambassador of Israel to Sweden (2008-2012).

Benny Dagan holds a B.A degree in Middle East History and Political Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler is a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and head of the institute’s Media Reform Program and Democracy in the Information Age Program.

Shwartz Altshuler holds a doctorate in law (LLD) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and completed her post-doctoral studies at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. 

Shwartz Altshuler is a board member of the Israel National Press Council, a board member of the Israeli Digital Rights Movement, a board member of the Center for Ethics in Jerusalem and a member of the Supreme Council of Archives of the State of Israel.

In recent years, Dr. Shwartz Altshuler has composed the journalistic code of ethics for Israel’s public broadcasting corporation (“Kan”) and for the Globes business newspaper; drafted a bill for a new privacy law in Israel; and appeared regularly in the Israeli and international media on issues relating to media, technology, democracy, and human rights. She has also published a number of books, articles, policy studies, and expert opinions on these subjects.

Prof. Gisela Dachs teaches at the DAAD Center for German Studies and at the European Forum at the Hebrew University; she holds a PHD from the Department of Communication, Tel Aviv University, (on “news media consumption and identity negotiation among bicultural immigrants citizens in Israel”), but her expertise about media is also based on her long career as a professional journalist, having worked exclusively for more than twenty years for the prestigious German weekly DIE ZEIT, first as a political editor in Hamburg and then as its correspondent in Israel. Prior to that, she had begun her career as a journalist for the French daily Libération in Paris, covering among others, the fall of the Berlin wall. Today, she also writes for the Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag and has a monthly column in Wina, Austria.     

She is the author of several books about Israel and the Middle East, and is a frequent lecturer about these topics in Europe. She has also lectured at the  Interdisciplinary Center Herzlyia (IDC) on ´Cross-Border-Journalism or How to be a Foreign Correspondent´. Since 2001 she is the editor of the Jewish Yearbook “Jüdischer Almanach” of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem. Most recently, she is also the editor of the compendium “Country report Israel”, published 2016 by the Federal Agency for Civic Education in Germany that serves as an academic basis for the newly started Israel studies at German universities.

Janne Tienari is Professor of Management and Organisation at Hanken School of Economics, Finland. His research and teaching interests include strategy work, managing multinational corporations, mergers and acquisitions, gender and diversity, feminist theory, branding and media, and changing academia from a critical perspective. He is Senior Editor of Organization Studies. Tienari’s work has been published in leading journals such as Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Organization, Human Relations, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of World Business, and Gender, Work and Organization.

Orna Keren-Carmel is a historian for modern Scandinavia. She received her MA in European Studies from Aarhus University (DK), and her PhD, titled The Rescue of Danish Jewry in Israeli Historiography and Culture of Memory (1943-2013) from Tel Aviv University. Based on a post-doc research conducted at Albert-Ludwigs University (Freiburg, DE) and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she recently published her book Israel and Scandinavia – The Beginning of Relations (2021). Her research interests are Scandinavian Welfare in the 20th century, the Second World War in the Scandinavian countries, the 'Nordic Model', and Israeli-Scandinavian relations.
 

Leif Pagrotsky served as a Cabinet Minister in the Swedish Social Democratic Government 1996-2006. He held the positions of Minister of Industry and Trade and Minister for Education, Research and Culture. He was also a member of the executive committee of the Social Democratic Party. His latest assignment was as Consul General of Sweden in New York.

Gili S. Drori is professor of sociology and anthropology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and Director of The European Forum at The Hebrew University. Gili earned her academic education at Tel Aviv University (BA 1986; and MA 1989) and Stanford University (PhD, 1997, sociology). Before joining the faculty of The Hebrew University in 2011, Gili served as Director of IR Honors Program and taught at Stanford University for a decade. She also taught at the University of California Berkeley, the Technion (Israel), and University of Bergamo (Italy) and was a guest scholar at Uppsala University (Sweden). Formerly (2018-2020), Gili served as President of the Israeli Sociological Society. Gili’s books and articles express her research interests in: globalization and glocalization; organizational change and rationalization; world society theory; science, innovation and higher education; technology divides; and, culture and policy regimes.

Haldor Byrkjeflot is professor at Department of Sociology and Human Geography at University of Oslo. He has been academic director of the strategic initiative UIO:Nordic at University of Oslo and has also initiated a Nordic strategic university hub related to research on the Nordics in a global context (ReNEW) with six Nordic universities as partners. His research interests include the emergence and circulation of societal and organizational models, organization theory, bureaucracy as well as historical-comparative studies. He has published articles on comparative management, the globalization of the MBA, changing knowledge regimes in universities, comparative labor systems, the role of bureaucracy in modern societies and reforms and organizational dynamics in health and education. Most recently he has coedited a forthcoming book on The Making and Circulation of Nordic Models (Routledge 2021)

Jacob Eriksson is Lecturer in Post-war Recovery Studies in the Department of Politics at the University of York. Jacob’s research focuses on conflict, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding in the Middle East. His first book, Small-state Mediation in International Conflicts: Diplomacy and Negotiation in Israel-Palestine was published by IB Tauris in 2015. He is the editor, together with Dr Ahmed Khaleel, of Iraq after ISIS: The challenges of post-war recovery, published by Palgrave in 2019.

Eran Feitelson is a Professor at the Department of Geography of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the founder and previous head of the Advanced School for Environmental Studies. He was previously head of the Federmann School for Public Policy and Government and chair of the Department of Geography. He holds an MA in geography and economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Ph.D from the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. He has published over 100 articles in refereed journals and edited volumes on water policy issues, transport policy, environmental policy, and planning. Recently he has worked extensively on earthquake preparedness in Israel.
In addition to his academic work Eran Feitelson has participated in several national planning teams in Israel and has been a member of many national committees. He is currently chairing for the second time the National Parks and Nature Reserves Commission, having chaired it for ten years in the past. Prof. Feitelson received the “Yekir hatichnun” award for 2015, the highest award of the Israeli Planning Association.

Michal Frenkel is an Associate Professor and the Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has published extensively on managerial models and their translation across national borders, on organizational aesthetics, gender, race, nationality and religiosity within and around organizations, on center-periphery relations in organization studies. Her papers appeared in journals such as the Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Gender & Society, Gender, Work & Organization, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Organization and the Scandinavian Journal of Management. Her current studies focus on gender and religiosity in and around organizations.

Ester Pollack, PhD, is a professor of Journalism Studies at Stockholm University. Her research concerns historical and critical studies of the societal roles of journalism and its significance for democracy. Pollack received her doctorate 2001 with a thesis on the development of Swedish crime journalism and criminal policy during the 1900s; and has followed up with more recent studies on crime news, the police’s role as news source and the emerging journalistic cooperation between different countries for revealing corruption within international companies. A second field of research concerns journalism’s role in the history of politics and includes Swedish news reporting about the Soviet Union in the 1930s as well as studies focusing on Swedish media and the Holocaust during the second world war. Another area of research is centered on political communication and political journalism: journalism and political scandals in the Nordic region, advocacy think-tanks in the Nordic region, the role of lobbying in Sweden and journalism as a public good.

Pollack has also served as the department’s head for a total of ten years and held various other positions at Stockholm university. She has a been an active member in the Swedish as well as in the Nordic Media Research Association and in the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), where she was member of the International Council and chaired the organizing committee at the IAMCR World congress 2008 in Stockholm.