Aaron Hahn Tapper is the Director of the Swig Program in Jewish
Studies and Social Justice and current Swig Chair in Judaic
Studies.
Aaron completed his Ph.D. in the Religious Studies Department at
the University of California, Santa Barbara, writing his
Dissertation on the relationship between the socio-political
context of Israel and Palestine, religious law, and power. He holds
an MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a BA from the Johns Hopkins
University. Before coming to USF he served as Adjunct Faculty in
the Religious Studies Department at California State University,
Northridge. His interdisciplinary research interests are American
Jews, American Muslims, comparative religions, the history of
religions, the interplay between politics and religion, the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and nonviolence.
Aaron has lived and studied abroad in Bir Zeit, Cairo, Fes,
Jerusalem, and the Hague, among other cities. He is academically
fluent in multiple dialects of Hebrew and Arabic. Aaron has
received numerous awards and fellowships for his work, including
the Harvard University Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, a
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, and the Wexner
Graduate Fellowship. In 2003, he founded Abraham's
Vision, a conflict transformation organization working with
American-based populations of Jews, Muslims, Israelis, and
Palestinians, for whom he has served as Co-Executive Director since
that time. Since September 2008 he has also served as the
Co-Executive Director of the Center for
Transformative Education, a new educational initiative aiming
to create empowering educational programs to transform societies
into their potential, which he co-founded.
