Join IIJS and the Columbia Oral History MA Program for the Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award Talk: "Documenting Democratic Backsliding" featuring this year’s award winner, Maya Gayer. This event will take place on Zoom, Thursday, February 19, at 10:00–11:30 a.m.
This year’s annual Brodsky Award Lecture features OHMA alum and 2025 Brodsky Award recipient Maya Gayer, who will speak about her award-winning thesis work, and its connections to broader trends of global democratic backsliding. The Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award recognizes a student whose thesis makes a significant contribution to knowledge and most exemplifies the rigor, creativity, and ethical integrity that OHMA teaches its students. Gayer’s thesis, In Defense of Democracy: An Oral History Archive of the Israeli Democracy Protest Movement, examines the unprecedented wave of mobilization in Israel and worldwide during 2023–sparked by the Israeli government's proposed judicial overhaul, which threatened democratic checks and balances and led to the emergence of the largest grassroots protest movement in the country’s history. As a 2023–24 Fulbright Scholar at OHMA, Gayer conducted interviews with over twenty key leaders and organizers across the movement, foregrounding the voices and strategies of those who shaped the protest movement. The collection aims to preserve the history of this pivotal moment in Israeli society and contribute to the study of democratic backsliding and civil resistance, offering a critical case study for other societies facing similar challenges.
This event will feature a presentation by Maya Gayer, followed by a Q&A with the audience.
She will discuss the events leading up to the creation of the protest movement, its place within the global phenomenon of democratic backsliding, and the recurring patterns that characterize this trend. She will also share insights from interviewees about the elements of effective civic resistance, and reflect on the process and dilemmas of producing oral histories during a moment of crisis, including the tension between journalistic reporting and oral history practice.
Maya Gayer is a journalist, content editor, and program director with over two decades of experience in the media field. Maya was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in Public Humanities to pursue an MA in Columbia University’s Oral History Program. Her Brodsky Award-winning thesis project–an oral history collection documenting the Israeli Democracy Protest Movement–is intended to be preserved in the Israel National Library, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Judaica and Hebraica Collections at Stanford University.
Prior to her studies in OHMA, Maya spent the past decade as a senior director of programming at one of Israel’s most popular public radio stations. She was responsible for the station's Holocaust Remembrance Day broadcasts and served as editor-in-chief of The Broadcast University, one of the station’s flagship programs, known for making academic knowledge accessible to the general public. In recent years, Maya established and directed the Persitz Program in Arts Management at the Tel Aviv–Jaffa municipality and was the head content editor of the science documentary series The Future is Already Here, which aired on KAN (Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation). She also taught radio and podcast production at Sapir Academic College and the University of Haifa. Maya holds an MA, Magna Cum Laude, in Film and Television studies from Tel Aviv University.
This event is co-sponsored by the Columbia University Oral History MA Program.
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