Yoav Sivan is a writer, editor and researcher based in New York. He publishes in English and Hebrew.
Yoav received an M.Sc. from Columbia Journalism School and afterwards was a Visiting Scholar at the sociology department at NYU.
His initial academic training, however, was in economics at Tel Aviv University, from which he received his B.A., and at the economics graduate program of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he co-wrote a game-theory model of how gay men hook up. You can read the paper here.
He also studied at the graduate philosophy program at Tel Aviv University, where he had the great fortune of learning from the philosopher Professor Joseph Agassi, a student of Sir Karl Popper, who taught him that a real question has more than one answer.
In his past as an activist, he served on the Boards of Israel’s LGBT Association (Aguda) and the Jerusalem Open House, and as the LGBT Coordinator of the International Union of Socialist. Probably his most ambitious initiative has been a text-study group of left-wing activists from the Tel Aviv University Meretz student cell and Haredi Yeshiva students.
Yoav has been researching and writing about the Israeli system and political culture. His paper, “Israel’s Paradox of Authority” (Law and Authority: Before and After February 16, 1949) advances a radical rethink of Israel’s constitutionalism.