On October 27, 2026, Israelis will vote in national elections widely seen as perhaps the most consequential in the country's modern history. Why do Israelis view the 2026 elections in such dramatic, even existential, terms? Who are the main contenders and what are the main issues on which Israel will vote in the first national elections since the October 7, 2023 attack and subsequent wars? And what are the possible scenarios for the outcome of the elections? Join Amichai Magen and Masua Sagiv in conversation about these questions.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Dr. Masua Sagiv is a Senior Faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute and the academic advisor of its Center for Shared Society, as well as a senior fellow at the Helen Diller Institute, U.C. Berkeley. Masua’s work addresses the fundamental challenges facing both Israeli society and North American Jewish communities, from rising antisemitism and campus tensions to Jewish peoplehood and the complex relationship between Israel and world Jewry. Masua’s scholarly work focuses on the development of contemporary Judaism in Israel, as a culture, religion, nationality, and as part of Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state. Her research explores the role of law, state actors, and civil society organizations in promoting social change across diverse issues: shared society, religion and gender, religion and state, and Jewish peoplehood.

Masua recently returned to Israel after four years in Berkeley, California, where she was a senior faculty member for the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor at the Helen Diller Institute at UC Berkeley. Prior to her tenure in the Bay Area, Masua was the Academic Director of the Menomadin Center for Jewish and Democratic Law at Bar-Ilan University and taught at the Schools of Law at Bar-Ilan University and Tel-Aviv University. She co-led a leadership program for high-school students, for which she received the Israeli Hope in Academia Prize from former Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, and was awarded the Gorney Prize for Young Scholar in Public Law. Her book, Radical Conservativism (in Hebrew), on the Halachic Feminist struggle in Israel, was published by Carmel Publishing House in 2024.