Professor Yael (Yuli) Tamir is the President of Beit Berl College and an adjunct professor at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University.
Representing the Labor Party she served as Israel’s Minister of Immigration (1999-2001) and as Minister of Education (2006-2009), as well as the deputy speaker of the Knesset and a member of the Finance committee, the Education committee and the Security and Foreign Affairs committee.
Tamir received her BA and MA from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and her Ph.D. in political philosophy from Oxford University where she wrote her thesis under the supervision of Sir Isaiah Berlin. She was a professor at Tel-Aviv University and a scholar-in-residence at Princeton, Harvard, the European University in Florence, the Central European University in Budapest, NYU and Penn.
Professor Tamir received many academic awards including: the Gal Ed Prize for original work in the social sciences, the Balliol College Domus Scholarship, the Moses Montefiore Scholarship, the Alon Fellowship, the Laurence S. Rockefeller Fellowship and the Fulbright Fellowship, as well as research fellowships at the Center for in Ethics and the Professions at Harvard University and the Centre for Human Values at Princeton University.
Tamir is the author of Liberal-Nationalism (Princeton University Press 1999), as well as numerous articles in the fields of moral and political philosophy, philosophy of education, feminism and human rights. She is the editor of Democratic Education in a Multicultural State (Blackwell) and, with Professor Macedo, Moral and Political Education (New York University Press). Her recent book, Why Nationalism, has been published by Princeton University Press (2019).
Professor Tamir is a founding member of the Israeli peace movement “Peace Now” and served as the chairperson of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel.