Rhona Seidelman

Rhona Seidelman is the director of the Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma.  Additionally, Professor Seidelman is the Schusterman Chair of Modern Israel and an Associate Professor of History.  She is the preeminent expert on the history of Shaar Ha’aliya - Israel’s ‘Ellis Island’ – as well as one of the leading scholars on the history of medicine and public health in Israel.   

Professor Seidelman’s book, Under Quarantine: Immigrants and Disease at Israel’s Gate, tells the story of Shaar Ha’aliya through a focus on the conflicts surrounding the camp’s medically defended isolation.  She argues that the story of the Shaar Ha’aliya quarantine is the story of the Israeli immigration experiment: a modern experiment of nation building, belonging, and power that is deeply tied to issues of health and disease. Under Quarantine sets out to show that we cannot fully understand Israel until we understand Shaar Ha’aliya. Here was the country’s crucible. A gateway for nearly half a million immigrants, this is where they began to be changed into the Israeli people and where the Israeli people began to be profoundly changed by them. 

Professor Seidelman’s work has appeared in Jewish Social Studies, The American Journal of Public Health, The Journal of Israeli History and World Literature Today.   

She is committed to making her research accessible to a broad public audience, publishing editorials in journals such as in geveb, AJS Perspectives, Ha’aretz and The Daily Oklahoman.  Additionally, she served as an historical consultant for the BBC Documentary Series ‘The Holy Land and Us’ while also appearing in the series itself, to recount the story of Shaar Ha’aliya at the historic site of the camp. Currently she is serving as an historical consultant for a new Hebrew language, Israeli dramatic series that is set in Shaar Ha’aliya. 

Her essay ‘Claiming My Egypt’, published in World Literature Today, explores Egyptian identity among the children of Egyptian-Jewish refugees.

Professor Seidelman is at work on two major research projects.  In Medicine, With History:  A Conversation is an interdisciplinary, collaborative work with her father, physician and scholar William E. Seidelman.  Together they argue for the study of the history of medicine – particularly the history of medicine and the Holocaust – to be taught in medical schools. 

Zionism, Tuberculosis and the Making of the 20th Century tells the story of Israel through patients’ experiences with tuberculosis from 1882 until today.  This work seeks to understand the ways that tuberculosis shapes contemporary Israel, in the age of multidrug-resistant TB and 21st century pandemics, how it shaped the country at the beginning of the bacteriological era - at a time when Louis Pasteur himself believed that science was close to eradicating infectious disease from the world - and what this evolution tells us about social, medical and 20th century histories.

The driving interests shaping Professor Seidelman’s work are transnational experiences of immigration as well as the way histories of health and disease reveal some of the most fundamental facets of human emotion and behavior, such as: fear, exclusion, love and care. 

Originally from Canada, Professor Seidelman holds a B.A. (Summa Cum Laude) and M.A. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD from Ben Gurion University of the Negev.