Daniel Bar-Tal
DANIEL BAR-TAL is Professor Emeritus at the School of Education, Tel Aviv University. Daniel Bar-Tal was born in Stalinabad (today Dushanbe) Tajikistan, USSR in 1946 to Polish Jews who escaped in 1939 from Poland. He lived his childhood in Szczecin, Poland, until his immigration to Israel in 1957. In Israel he completed his education including undergraduate studies in psychology and sociology at Tel Aviv University. He received his graduate training in social psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, and completed his doctoral thesis in 1974. His dissertation supervisors were Martin Greenberg, Irene Frieze, Paul Lazarsfeld, Robert Glaser and Lauren Resnick. During his doctoral study he participated in the interdisciplinary program led by the legendary sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the School of Education, Tel-Aviv University.
In the first phase of his career he was interested in helping behavior and social psychology of education, which resulted in dozens of contributing papers and a few books. Since the early eighties his interest has shifted to political psychology. First, he was interested in shared beliefs in groups and societies, in general, studying their formation, function and change. Later he directed most of his attention to the study of the socio-psychological foundations of intractable conflicts and peace building, including reconciliation. In the latter area, he studied the evolution of the socio-psychological infrastructure in times of intractable conflict that consists of shared societal beliefs of ethos of conflict, of collective memory, and emotional collective orientations. He examined their contents, acquisition, functions, societal mechanisms of their maintenance and institutionalization, as well as their contribution to the crystallization of social identity and development of culture of conflict during the conflict. Also he studied socio-psychological barriers to peacemaking and ways to overcome them. In this framework, he also examined the required changes in this socio-psychological repertoire for conflict resolution and reconciliation. Specifically, he proposed a conceptual framework for the development of an ethos of peace and reconciliation, of peace education and eventually of peace culture. In addition, in order to understand maintenance of conflicts he studied acquisition of the conflict repertoire by children and adolescents.
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He was the founding Director of the Walter Lebach Research Institute for Jewish-Arab Coexistence through Education from 2002 through 2005; was Co-editor in Chief of the Palestine Israel Journal from 2001 through 2005. He also served as the President of the International Society of Political Psychology from 1999 through 2000. He was Branco Weiss Chair for Research in Child Development and Education. He has published over twenty-five books and over two hundred and fifty articles and chapters in major social and political psychological journals, books and encyclopedias and received various awards for his academic achievements.
Through the years he has lectured widely on his work in many different countries, and worked as Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt University, Nashville; Brandeis University, Boston; Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; University of Muenster, Germany; University of Maryland, College Park; Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw; University of Palermo; and Australian National University, Canberra.
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He retired in 2015 and decided to devote his second career to political activism. He founded and led a peace organization Save Israel-Stop the Occupation with the goal of contributing to the struggle to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and establish a Palestinian state. He continues to write articles and books, leads a research group and is active in Israeli civil society.
Daniel Bar-Tal
School of Education.
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv, 69978
Israel
Email daniel@tauex.tau.ac.il