Sari Bashi

Sari Bashi "spent her fellowship year in Israel, establishing Gisha: Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, which offers legal assistance to Palestinians who face restrictions on their freedom to travel within and outside the Occupied Territories. Gisha is a new Israeli NGO whose founding was made possible, in part, by the Bernstein Fellowship.  Sari continues to serve as Gisha’s director, now directing a staff of nine, and is working to help individuals gain access to fundamental necessities such as jobs, schools, medical services, and family unity, by petitioning the Israeli military bureaucracy and Israel’s Supreme Court, using international and Israeli law.  Gisha also produces reports on the regime of travel restrictions and uses media and direct lobbying to change policies.  Following completion of her Bernstein Fellowship year, Sari received a social innovation fellowship from the Echoing Green Foundation to support her work with Gisha. She also teaches a class in international law at Tel Aviv University.

"Sari received her B.A. from Yale (1997) in Ethics, Politics & Economics. After college, she conducted research on ethnic identity among Ethiopian immigrants to Israel as part of a Fulbright Scholarship and worked as a Jerusalem correspondent for the Associated Press.  Sari graduated from the Law School in 2003.  As a law student, she participated in clinics bringing federal litigation on behalf of prisoners and providing legal services to residents of a public housing project in New Haven.  She also co-coordinated a study on the way in which Yale Law School educates female and male students; the study’s results have been published in the Journal of Legal Education and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism.  She spent her summers at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU  and at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.  Additional law school activities included work as a Civil Procedure teaching assistant to Professors Owen Fiss and Harold Koh and participating as a finalist in the Morris Tyler Moot Court competition. Licensed in the United States and Israel, Sari clerked for Israel Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levi and has assisted Israel Supreme Court President Aharon Barak in academic projects, including translating his book, Purposive Interpretation in Law, from Hebrew into English."


 * Bernstein Fellowship