Zvi Bekerman is an Argentine-born Israeli educational anthropologist, peace education researcher, and scholar based in Jerusalem. He has long served as a senior faculty member and researcher at the School of Education, the Melton Centre for Jewish Education, and the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Bekerman’s academic career centers on long-term ethnographic field research within integrated bilingual Palestinian-Jewish schools in Israel, alongside functioning as the founding editor of the international peer-reviewed journal Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education.
Born and raised in Latin America, Bekerman later immigrated to Israel, pursuing his advanced graduate research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he earned a Doctorate in Educational Anthropology and secured a long-standing academic tenure. He also serves as a faculty member at the Mandel School for Educational Leadership. Throughout his career, Bekerman has authored numerous academic monographs exploring how integrated, multicultural bilingual educational structures can mitigate systemic ethno-national divides in conflict zones. His fieldwork provides exhaustive empirical data on the negotiated identities of Palestinian and Jewish children learning together. He has consistently mobilized independent cross-cultural networks within Israel to study minority narratives, countering mainstream institutional restrictions on Palestinian identity education.
In 2019, he co-signed an open letter initiated by 240 international and Israeli scholars, strongly protesting the German Bundestag’s resolution characterizing the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, which supports Palestinian human rights, as “anti-Semitism.”