Erel N. Margalit, PhD

About

Margalit was born in 1961 on Kibbutz Na’an, near Rehovot in the Central District of Israel. His grandfather played a role in both the British Brigade and the Haganah (Israel’s underground fighting and intelligence services). His parents were each founding members of a different Moshav (an agricultural collective). In 1969 the family moved to Detroit Michigan, where Erel’s father was the head of a local Hebrew school. They returned to Israel in 1971, where Margalit finished high school before serving in the Army, as part of the elite Golani brigade. As a reservist he fought in the first Lebanon war in 1982. He attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and returned to the US for a Doctorate at Columbia University in Philosophy and Logic where his dissertation was, “The Entrepreneur as a [...] Margalit presents a very different view of Israel as a stark contrast to Netanyahu’s. “Netanyahu has a vision of the country as a fort and defines everything around it. His father wrote his PhD on the expulsion from Spain of the Jewish people.” Although Margalit’s own Sephardic roots reach back to the expulsion, he sees Israel not as a fort, insular and defending itself from outsiders, but rather as a creative force whose great strength is the power of its ideas and what it shares with the world. “Israel is a creative hub,” Margalit said. “We need a strong army but we are not defined by our army or military strength.” [...] It is economic issues that most animate Margalit: “In the last