Fred was born in Boston and grew up in Sharon Massachusetts. He was an Eagle Scout. In high school he served as New England Regional President of Young Judaea and attended Camp Tel Yehuda. After high school he participated in the Young Judaea Year Course in Israel.

At the University of Massachusetts in Amherst he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated Cum Laude in Government and History. He also served as president of Hillel. He received his MA and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. He joined the faculty at Ben Gurion University (BGU) in Israel in 1975. At BGU, he established an Interdisciplinary Program in Urban Studies and the Department of General Studies. He chaired the Department of Behavioral Science and served as the Director of the Hubert H. Humphrey Center of Social Ecology and the Overseas Student Program (OSP). During his tenure at OSP, the student body increased five fold. In 1991 Fred became the Lynn and Lloyd Hurst Family Professor of Local Government. He recently completed a term as Chair of the Department of Politics and Government at BGU.

During 2008- 2009 he is the Natan Visiting Professor in the Taub Center for Israel Studies at the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at NYU. In January February 2009 he will be the first incumbent of the Michel Vaisan Chair on Israeli Society and Politics at the Institute of Politics at Bordeaux University in France. In March 2008 he will give the David W. Belin Lecture in American Jewish Affairs at the Frankel Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan.

Fred has taught at the Hebrew University, NYU, UCLA, GWU, Cornell, Tufts and CUNY. He has served as a Visiting Scholar at universities in Sweden, France, China, Czech Republic, Canada and the US.

Professor Lazin has authored over sixty scholarly articles and chapters in books. He has written and edited ten books dealing with public policy in the United States, Israel and developing countries, Israeli politics and society and Jews in American politics. He received the Israel Political Science Association's award for the outstanding English language book on politics in 2005 for The Struggle for Soviet Jewry in American Politics; Israel versus the American Jewish Establishment. His pioneering research on the response of American Jewish organizations to German Jewish refugees in the 1930s opened a new field in Holocaust Studies.

Fred is married to Rachel Dabi Lazin. They have three children.

www.fredlazin.com
lazin@bgu.ac.il

Res: 212 262 3970
Cell: 917 699 4381

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