Emet Prize Laureates

Prof. Avner de Shalit spent seven of his adult years in the very non-urban setting of Kibbutz Samar in the Arava Desert, but still became a world renowned expert on cities and urban politics, on the way cities position themselves as alternatives to the state, and on how this impacts processes that trouble today’s world leaders.

De Shalit’s most recent book, Cities and Immigration (Oxford, 2018), which portrays the city’s dominance in attracting contemporary immigration while probing its potentially independent role alongside the state, consolidated his position as a global academic authority in one of the central issues with which the international system has come to grapple.

In addition, de Shalit has earned a reputation as a world-leading political philosopher, focusing on issues of poverty and environmental protection.

His book Disadvantage (Oxford, 2007) offers a redefinition of poverty, based on intensive interviews with the poor, consequently putting forward novel ideas for policies to tackle poverty. His book The Environment: Between Theory and Practice (Oxford, 2000) covers environmental policy’s fundamental dilemmas, like the ostensible contrast between placing man or the environment at the heart of governmental policy, or the place of the market economy in environmental protection, and thus supplied policymakers with a roadmap for one of our era’s most complex realms of politics and diplomacy.

A professor at the Hebrew University, de Shalit volunteered to teach at the Sapir College when it came under the nearby Gaza Strip’s rocket attacks. De Shalit harnesses the same enthusiasm to voluntarily lecture on a regular basis to NGOs and other groups all over Israel.