Anat Biletzki

Professor Anat Biletzki "has been teaching at the philosophy department in Tel Aviv University since 1979. She has traveled widely, as a visiting scholar and fellow at, among others, Cambridge University, Harvard University, Boston University, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Wittgenstein Archives in Bergen, Norway. Her publications include Paradoxes (1996), Talking Wolves: Thomas Hobbes on the Language of Politics and the Politics of Language (1997), What Is Logic? (2002), (Over)Interpreting Wittgenstein (2003), and articles on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Hobbes, analytic philosophy, political thought, digital culture, and human rights. She has served as chair of the Graduate School of Cultural Studies and of the Philosophy Department at Tel Aviv University and is a member of Israel's Ministry of Education committee for teaching philosophy in high-schools.

"Outside academia Biletzki has been active in the peace movement and in several human rights projects in Israel for over 25 years. During the first intifada she was one of the founders of the peace movement "The Twenty-First Year" – a group devoted to promoting civil objection to the occupation. In those same years she also worked with the Beta Committee which attempted to coordinate rehabilitation efforts for the West Bank village, Beta. In 1997-1998 Biletzki helped establish the human rights movement "Open Doors" which worked on liberating Palestinian administrative detainees in Israel – especially 11 detainees who had been incarcerated, without trial or due process, for over five years. Since 1996 Biletzki has been active as one of the leaders of Hacampus Lo Shotek – The Campus Is Not Silent – the most vociferous and influential campus group, made up of faculty and students at Tel Aviv University. She is on the board of FFIPP-Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, was chairperson of the board of B'Tselem - the Israeli Information center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (2001-2006), and is often invited abroad for public lecturing, for seminars at human rights conferences, for interviews, and for meetings with human rights counterparts. In 2005 she was chosen as one of "50 most influential women in Israel" by Globes, the Israeli business monthly, and was nominated among the "1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005." She has presented the issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with emphasis on the evils of occupation, all over the world (Boston, Princeton, Atlanta, London, Oslo, Bergen, Helsinki, Munich, Berlin, Istanbul); but it is in Israel – in the school system, in youth movements, and in public arenas – that she invests most of her efforts in public education for human rights and peace."