Winter 2001-02

New Deans Take Office

Prof. Arye Rattner Faculty of Social Sciences
A sociologist and criminologist, Arye Rattner is the new Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences.  He is a member of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and heads the University’s Center for the Study of Crime, Law, and Society, which is operated jointly with the Law Faculty.

Rattner has served as an expert witness on eyewitness identification in a number of trials and is associate editor of Justice Quarterly, the official publication of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.  In 1999, he was awarded nearly a half-million shekel grant by the Ministry of Science to conduct a wide-ranging study on “Why People Obey (or Don’t Obey) the Law.”  He is the co-author of two books. One is  Convicted but Innocent: Wrongful Conviction and Public Policy; published by Sage, it was selected as the best academic book for 1996 by Choice, the official journal of the National association of Librarians (U.S.A.). The second is Justice for All? Jews and Arabs in the Israeli Criminal Justice System, published by Praeger.  Rattner has also published articles and research reports dealing with crime trends, the criminal justice system, and illegalism in Israeli society. 
He earned his doctorate at The Ohio State University.  Prior to taking up the deanship, he was involved in a study of decision-making in the Israeli Supreme Court.  

Prof. Zvi Eisikovits—Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Studies
The newly elected Dean of the Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Studies is Prof. Zvi Eisikovits.  A member of the School of Social Work, he heads the Minerva Center for Youth Policy at the University. His areas of specialization are the study of family violence and violence among youth, in addition to the attitudes and positions taken by the young.  He gained his doctorate in social work at the University of Minnesota.  He has taught at various universities in Israel, Europe, and the United States, most recently at the University of Pennsylvania.

Active in various public forums both in Israel and around the world, Eisikovits has served as a senior consultant to the Ministry of Labor and Welfare and played a central role in developing various intervention models and policy in addition to social services for coping with violence in the family.  He is the author or editor of five books and has served on the editorial board of international academic journals in the field. 

Prof. Ruth Linn—Faculty of Education
The new Dean of the Faculty of Education, Prof. Ruth Linn, studies the field of moral psychology and focuses on issues associated with resistance to authority.  Linn’s doctorate, awarded by Boston University, was in the field of counseling psychological and human development.
She has written four books on the moral dilemmas faced by soldiers in the reserves during the Lebanon War in the early 1980s, on the Israeli reservist as a moral critic at the time of the (first) intifada, on the moral distress of mothers who are single by choice, and on the problematics of narrative representations of moral objection during the Holocaust. 
She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and Maryland Universities in the United States and at the University of British Columbia in Canada.  She is a winner of the Erikson Prize of the International Society of Political Psychology for her pioneering studies in the area of moral judgment of selective conscientious objectors during wartime.