Oren Kroll-Zeldin

Oren Kroll-Zeldin is the assistant Director of the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco where he is also an associate professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. He is the co-editor of This Is Your Song Too: Phish and Contemporary Jewish Identity (Penn State University Press) and author of the forthcoming book Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine (New York University Press). Oren is the co-founder and lead curator of Mapping Jewish San Francisco, a digital humanities project of the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice that takes a collaborative approach to examining the complex history and unique religious, cultural, and political identity of the Jewish San Francisco Bay Area. He is also the director of the Beyond Bridges: Israel-Palestine program with the Center for Global Education at USF and the Center for Transformative Education and has led numerous study trips to Israel/Palestine. He is an experienced facilitator for groups in conflict and was trained by the former director of the pre-eminent School for Peace in Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam (Oasis of Peace).  

His research and teaching focuses on issues relating to the complexity of Jewish identity and the connections between Judaism and social justice as well as the anthropology of the Middle East. Oren's writing has appeared in numerous journals, books, and online publications including Jerusalem Quarterly, Tikkun, Truthout, J Weekly, International Journal of Education for Social Justice, and +972 Magazine.

• Assistant Director, Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice

• California Institute of Integral Studies, PhD in Cultural Anthropology and Social Change
• California Institute of Integral Studies, MA in Cultural Anthropology and Social Change
• Skidmore College, BA in Religious Studies

• USF Distinguished Adjunct Teaching Award, 2017

• Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine (NYU Press), forthcoming 2024.
• This Is Your Song Too: Phish and Contemporary Jewish Identity, co-edited with Ariella Werden-Greenfield (Penn State University Press), 2023.
• “Impermeable Borders and the Futility of Walls.” In Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 32(2): 190-197, co-authored with Abby C. Wheatley, 2020.
• “Does Israel Function as an Apartheid State?: Critically Engaging the Complexities of the Apartheid Debate in Palestine/Israel.” In Social Justice and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Foundational and Contemporary Debates, edited by Mira Sucharov and Aaron J. Hahn Tapper: 175-187. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019.
• “Institutionalized Separation and Sumud in Jerusalem’s Periphery: Survival and Resistance in Sheikh Sa’ad.” In Jerusalem Quarterly 73: 101-116, 2018.