Yael Zerubavel is Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Rutgers and was the founding director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life (1996-1918). She received her Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania, and returned to it as faculty (1988-1996). Professor Zerubavel has published extensively in the areas of collective memory, Israeli culture, war and trauma, and symbolic landscapes. Her books include the award-winning Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Desert in the Promised Land (Stanford University Press, 2018). She is currently working on her book Biblical Reenactments: The Performance of Antiquity in Israeli Culture. She has served on the boards of the Association for Jewish Studies and the association for Israel Studies and on the editorial boards of key journals in the field of Israel Studies.