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On Wednesday, February 25, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is pleased to welcome Israeli journalist, news presenter, and prime-time television host Lucy Aharish to present the 2026 Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture.

The Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture honors the life of Daniel Pearl (Class of '85), who was a journalist, musician, and family man dedicated to the ideals of peace and humanity. In 2002, Daniel was kidnapped and killed by terrorists in Pakistan while working as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

The 2026 Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture is presented by the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program in partnership with Hillel at Stanford.
 

Speakers

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Lucy Aharish

News Anchor at Reshet 13

Lucy Aharish is an Israeli journalist, news presenter, and prime-time television host. Born in 1981 in Dimona, Israel, Aharish studied Political Science and Theater at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Journalism at the Koteret School of Journalism in Tel Aviv. She hosted the main English-language news show on the i24news channel for 3 years and served as showrunner for both English- and Arabic-language channels. Currently, she hosts a daily news talk show on Reshet Channel 13, one of Israel's main TV channels. Aharish co-founded and served as the head anchor of DemocratTV — a crowdfunded, independent social media platform that became the largest crowdfunding project in Israel. She is best known for promoting pluralism and interdenominational openness in Israel's public sphere. Her dedication to Arab-Jewish co-existence and shared Israeliness has been recognized by some of Israel's highest national honors. She received the OMETZ (courage) award in October 2015 for her fight against all forms of discrimination in Israel and was selected to light a torch at the national ceremony for Israel's Independence Day on Mount Herzl, the theme of which was pioneering, groundbreaking Israelis. In 2024, Aharish received the prestigious Quality of Government Champion Prize, an annual award given by the Movement for Quality Government in Israel.

Amichai Magen
Amichai Magen

Bechtel Conference Center (Encina Hall, First floor, Central)
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

Registration is required to attend.

Lucy Aharish
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Israel Studies
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On Wednesday, January 14, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is pleased to welcome Ambassador Dennis Ross — a veteran U.S. negotiator in Arab-Israeli peace negotiations and advisor on Middle East policy — to discuss his latest book, Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Lead in a Multipolar World. The discussion will be in conversation with Michael McFaul and moderated by Amichai Magen.

About the Book

 

In a world that is multipolar and America has less relative power, the United States no longer has the luxury to practice statecraft badly.

Statecraft 2.0 book cover

The United States may still be the world's strongest country, but it now faces real challenges at both a global and regional level. The unipolar world which was dominated by America after the Cold War is gone. Unlike the Soviet Union, China is both a military and economic competitor and it is actively challenging the norms and institutions that the US used to shape an international order during and after the Cold War. Directly and indirectly, it has partners trying to undo the American-dominated order, with Russia seeking to extinguish Ukraine, and Iran trying to undermine American presence, influence, and any set of rules for the Middle East that it does not dominate.

The failures of American policy in Afghanistan and Iraq have weakened the domestic consensus for a US leadership role internationally. Traditions in US foreign policy, especially the American sense of exceptionalism, have at different points justified both withdrawal and international activism. Iraq and Afghanistan fed the instinct to withdraw and to end the "forever wars." But the folly of these US interventions did not necessarily mean that all use of force to back diplomacy or specific political ends was wrong; rather it meant in these cases, the Bush Administration failed in the most basic task of good statecraft: namely, marrying objectives and means. Nothing more clearly defines effective statecraft than identifying well-considered goals and then knowing how to use all the tools of statecraft--diplomatic, economic, military, intelligence, information, cyber, scientific, education--to achieve them. But all too often American presidents have adopted goals that were poorly defined and not thought through.

In Statecraft 2.0, Dennis Ross explains why failing to marry objectives and means has happened so often in American foreign policy. He uses historical examples to illustrate the factors that account for this, including political pressures, weak understanding of the countries where the US has intervened, changing objectives before achieving those that have been established, relying too much on ourselves and too little on allies and partners. To be fair, there have not only been failures, there have been successes as well. Ross uses case studies to look more closely at the circumstances in which Administrations have succeeded and failed in marrying objectives and means. He distills the lessons from good cases of statecraft--German unification in NATO, the first Gulf War, the surge in Iraq 2007-8--and bad cases of statecraft--going to war in Iraq 2003, and the Obama policy toward Syria. Based on those lessons, he develops a framework for applying today a statecraft approach to our policy toward China, Iran, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The book concludes with how a smart statecraft approach would shape policy toward the new national security challenges of climate, pandemics, and cyber.

Speakers

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Ambassador Dennis Ross

Counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Ambassador Dennis Ross is the counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He also teaches at Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization. For more than twelve years, Amb. Ross played a leading role in shaping U.S. involvement in the Middle East peace process, dealing directly with the parties as the U.S. point man on the peace process in both the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. He served two and half years as special assistant to President Obama and National Security Council senior director for the Central Region, spending the first 6 months of the Administration as the special advisor on Iran to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. His newest book is Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Lead in a Multipolar World (Oxford University Press, March 2025).

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Amichai Magen

Director, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program, CDDRL

Amichai Magen is the founding director of the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Previously, he served as the visiting fellow in Israel Studies at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, head of the MA Program in Diplomacy & Conflict Studies, and director of the Program on Democratic Resilience and Development (PDRD) at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, Reichman University, Herzliya, Israel. His research and teaching interests address democracy, the rule of law, liberal orders, risk and political violence, as well as Israeli politics and policy.

Magen received the Yitzhak Rabin Fulbright Award (2003), served as a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and was the W. Glenn Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution (2008-9). In 2016, he was named a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy, an award that recognizes outstanding thought leaders around the world. Between 2018 and 2022, he served as principal investigator in two European Union Horizon 2020 research consortia, EU-LISTCO and RECONNECT. Amichai Magen served on the Executive Committee of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and is a Board Member of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR) and the International Coalition for Democratic Renewal (ICDR).

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Michael McFaul

Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies, Department of Political Science; Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution

Michael McFaul is former director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995. Dr. McFaul is also an international affairs analyst for NBC News. He served for five years in the Obama administration, first as special assistant to the president and senior director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).

He has authored several books, most recently Autocrats versus Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder. Earlier books include the New York Times bestseller From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia, Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should, How We Can; Transitions To Democracy: A Comparative Perspective (eds. with Kathryn Stoner); Power and Purpose: American Policy toward Russia after the Cold War (with James Goldgeier); and Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.

He teaches courses on great power relations, democratization, comparative foreign policy decision-making, and revolutions.

Dr. McFaul was born and raised in Montana. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. In International Relations at Oxford University in 1991. His DPhil thesis was Southern African Liberation and Great Power Intervention: Towards a Theory of Revolution in an International Context.

Amichai Magen
Amichai Magen

Registration required. Virtual to Public. If prompted for a password, use: 123456.
Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina Hall C231 (William J. Perry Conference Room) may attend in person. 

Ambassador Michael McFaul
Ambassador Dennis Ross
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Israel Studies
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Amichai Magen, Kathryn Stoner, and Larry Diamond
Amichai Magen, Kathryn Stoner, and Larry Diamond.
Rod Searcey
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Building on a successful pilot at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program will deepen understanding of Israel through new classes, collaborative research, and community engagement.

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In July 2015, General Qasem Soleimani, former commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force, secretly traveled to Moscow to discuss an emergency plan to rescue the Assad regime in Syria, which had lost control of roughly 80 percent of Syrian territory in four years of civil war. Russia had just helped broker the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Soleimani’s trip, disclosed three months later, took place in defiance of UN travel sanctions tied to Iran’s nuclear program and threatened to undermine it. Yet the meeting would initiate a decadelong evolution of the Iranian-Russian relationship, from tactical cooperation in Syria to close partnership today, culminating in the signing of a strategic partnership agreement between the two countries in January 2025.

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Foreign Affairs
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Or (Ori) Rabinowitz
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The King Philanthropies Professor of Marketing, Stanford Graduate School of Business
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Jonathan Levav is a professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business. His research is aimed at understanding consumers’ judgments and choices by using tools from experimental psychology and behavioral economics. In particular, he studies the contextual factors that influence people’s choices and judgments. His research is both basic and applied — from probability judgment to product customization decisions.

Jonathan received his PhD in marketing from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and his AB in public and international affairs from Princeton University. He is the winner of the Hillel Einhorn Young Investigator Award, awarded biennially by the Society for Judgment and Decision-Making. Prior to joining Stanford, he was a member of the faculty at Columbia Business School.

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Pediatric Pulmonary and Cystic Fibrosis Clinic
770 Welch Rd Ste 380
MC 5882
Palo Alto CA 94304

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Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Pediatric Pulmonary Medicine
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A physician scientist, Dr. Cornfield is actively engaged in clinical medicine, teaching and research. In clinical arena, Dr. Cornfield is a Pediatrician with an active practice in both Pediatric Pulmonary Medicine and Pediatric Critical Care Medicine. In the research arena, Dr. Cornfield's lab addresses several large thematic issues. The areas of concentration include: (i) regulation of pulmonary vascular tone; (ii) oxygen sensing in the lung; (iii) biological determinants of preterm labor focusing on myometrial smooth muscle cells; (iv) developmental regulation of barrier function in the lung; and (v) the role of hypoxia-inducible factor-1 in lung development. In addition, there is an active translational research component.

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Pigott Hall, Bldg 260, Rm 214

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Eva Chernov Lokey Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Language and Literature
Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature
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Vered Karti Shemtov teaches Hebrew literature at the Department of Comparative Literature and the Middle Eastern Program at Stanford University.  She is the Director of the Hebrew Project at Stanford and the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Dibur. She previously served as the Co-Director of the Stanford Center for Jewish Studies. Some of Shemtov's publications include: Changing Rhythms: Towards a Theory of Prosody in Cultural Context (Bar Ilan Press, Israel, 2012), several co-edited issues, including: Spoken Word, Written Word: Rethinking the Representation of Speech in Literature (2015), 1948: History and Responsibility (2013), and Jewish Conceptions and Practices of Space (2005). Shemtov published numerous articles, including "Limbotopia: The “New Present”" and the "Literary Imagination" (Journal of Comparative Literature, 2018, with Elana Gomel), "A Sense of No Ending: Contemporary Literature and the Refusal to Write the Future" (Dibur Literary Jounral, 2018, with Elana Gomel), "Poetry and Dwelling: From Martin Heidegger to the Songbook of the Tent Revolution in Israel" (Prooftext). Other articles focus on the works of Amos Oz, Yehudah Amichai, Michal Govrin, A.B Yehoshua, Zruya Shalev, and an entry on “Hebrew Poetry: 1781-2010”  in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Revised Edition. Until 2019, Shemtov served as the Chair of the Literature Committee for the National Organization for Professors of Hebrew.

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Lecturer, Medicine - Primary Care and Population Health
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Gordon founded the Social Entrepreneurship Collaboratory (SE Labs) at Stanford, Harvard and Princeton. He teaches about the design, development and leadership of innovative social impact ventures in global health and environmental sustainability.

At Stanford, Gordon is director of the Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Lab (SE Lab)- Human & Planetary Health and is a faculty fellow of the Center for Innovation in Global Health. He is a Lecturer in the School of Medicine, Division of Primary Care and Population Health/Dept. of Medicine, and an advisor in the Distinguished Careers Institute (DCI), and the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program, and cofounder of the Stanford Sustainable Societies Lab.

At Harvard, Gordon taught jointly on the faculties of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health (Health Policy & Management) and the Harvard Kennedy School (Management, Leadership & Decision Sciences) and served as an Expert-in-Residence (EiR) at the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-Lab), and affiliated faculty at the Center for Primary Care, Harvard Medical School (HMS). He was faculty director of the Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Lab (SE Lab) for US & Global Health, an incubator course taught in a new interdisciplinary, collaborative model based at the i-Lab. He has also served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (2013-2014) at Harvard Business School in the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, on the Faculty of Arts & Sciences in the Sociology Department, at the Harvard Kennedy School, on the Leadership & Management faculty, and as a principal of the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations (2004-2007). Gordon served as one of the founding faculty of the $10 million Reynolds Fellows Program in Social Entrepreneurship, a Center for Public Leadership and Harvard President’s interdisciplinary fellowship initiative that paid full tuition and stipend for graduate students from the Harvard Kennedy School, School of Public Health and Graduate School of Education.

At Princeton, Gordon served as Dean’s Visiting Professor in Entrepreneurship in 2009-2010. Working together with the School of Engineering & Applied Science, the [Woodrow Wilson] School of Public & International Affairs, and the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, he launched a new set of programs and prizes in social innovation and entrepreneurship in collaboration with students, faculty and alumni.

At Stanford in 2001-2002, Gordon created the SE Lab, a Silicon Valley and technology–influenced, interdisciplinary incubator for social impact ventures and global problem solving. Gordon taught on the Public Policy Program and Urban Studies Program faculties (School of Humanities & Sciences) and served as a faculty affiliate at the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a Program Officer at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Many of the talented students and fellows in Gordon’s SE Labs have won the top awards of prestigious idea and business plan competitions, including those at Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and MIT.

Gordon is a co-author in the edited volume Frontiers in Social Innovation (N. Malhotra, ed., Harvard Business Review Press, 2022) and Social Entrepreneurship: New Models of Sustainable Social Change (A. Nicholls, ed., Oxford University Press, 2006/2008) and served as a founding member of the Oxford/Ashoka led University Network for Social Entrepreneurship. His interest in entrepreneurship is informed by work in both the private and nonprofit sectors in the U.S. (New York, Cambridge, Palo Alto), Europe (London, Paris) and Asia (Hong Kong), as CEO of a medical technology company (EDAP Technomed, USA) and in international strategy consulting (Bain & Co. Ltd.).

Gordon is married to Sara Singer- they on occasion teach together at Stanford, have a daughter Audrey and son Jason, and live in the Frenchman's Hill residential section of campus.

Co-founder, Stanford Sustainable Societies Lab
Director, Stanford Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Lab (SE Lab)- Human & Planetary Health
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