Avi Shilon

Visiting Associate Professor
as6803@columbia.edu

The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies is pleased to welcome Avi Shilon back for the fall 2026 semester. Dr. Shilon previously served as a visiting faculty member at IIJS in spring 2023 and 2025, where his course, History of Modern Israel, was exceptionally well received. 

Shilon is a historian who specializes in Israel Studies. His PhD dissertation focuses on the attitudes of the leaders of the Revisionist Movement toward Jewish religion from 1925 to 2005.

He is the author of Menachem Begin’s biography, Menachem Begin: A Life (Yale University Press, 2013); Ben Gurion: His Later Years in the Political Wilderness (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); and The Decline of the Left-wing in Israel: Yossi Beilin and the Politics of the Peace Process (I.B. Tauris, 2020). He is the editor of the new book To The Right of Zionism: Studies in the History of the Zionist Right: From Jabotinsky to Netanyahu (Am Oved, 2026), currently available only in Hebrew. 

He was a visiting scholar at NYU from 2019 to 2022, he taught courses at the Hebrew University and Ben-Gurion University in Israel, as well as at NYU and Rutgers University in the U.S., and Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Shilon is also the editor of the non-fiction section at Am-Oved Publishing House and writes op-ed columns for the YNET website. He is currently teaching at the new university, The University of Kiryat Shmona in the Galilee.