Dr. Nechumi Yaffe

Dr. Nechumi Malovicki-Yaffe is a tenured senior lecturer at the School of Public Policy at Tel Aviv University, head of the academic division at the TITA Institute in Jerusalem, and co-director of the Haredi Research Group at UCLA.

She began her professional life in the Bais Yaakov system: for more than a decade she taught history at seminaries in Jerusalem, served as an educational consultant in the Charedi school system, sat on the committee that wrote the national matriculation exam in history, and wrote textbooks and teaching guides on the history of the Middle East for girls in the eleventh and twelfth grades. She holds a bachelor’s degree in the humanities and two master’s degrees: one in Jewish studies from Touro College, and one from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with a thesis on the integration of Charedim into Israeli society.

She completed her doctorate at the Hebrew University, at the Swiss Center for Conflict Research, with a dissertation on poverty and identity in Charedi society. From there she went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University, at the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy, and taught at Rutgers University and at Yale University’s summer school. Since 2019 she has been a faculty member at Tel Aviv University. In the 2026–27 academic year she is on sabbatical as a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School.

After October 7th she founded and led the Charedi civilian emergency network, which recruited and mobilized some 100,000 Charedi volunteers for relief work. For this work she received a Knighthood Award from the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation in 2024. In 2026 she led a primary for Charedi women, a civic effort to increase their political participation.

She has nineteen academic articles published or forthcoming in international journals in social psychology, public policy, and sociology, and co-edited the volume New Trends in the Study of Haredi Culture and Society. In 2022 she received Tel Aviv University’s Rector’s Award for excellence in teaching, and in 2025 the Association for Israel Studies’ award for an outstanding early-career researcher.